Energy infrastructures such as pipelines and cables are not often the focus of literary representation. Environmental injustice is often perpetuated, however, by the very “banality of infrastructure,” which perhaps makes it an unseemly topic for literature. In this talk, WLP Professor Wendy W. Walters argues that Black speculative fiction animates infrastructure technology, bringing both the biopolitical and the chronopolitical stakes of infrastructure projects into view.
Nnedi Okorafor’s short fiction depicts the injustice of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, illustrating the slow violence of environmental toxicity created by the vast oil infrastructure running through residential backyards. In contrast, Samuel Delany’s 1968 novella, We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line, depicts the installation and maintenance of a post-oil network of power lines circling the globe. Characters in these stories enact various forms of revolt, from pipeline-bunkering in Okorafor to a refusal of Global Power in Delany. The stories generate an analysis of the link between infrastructure and state power, questioning the discourse of “improvement,” which is often part of the narrative logics of power/energy projects.
Walters, director of Emerson’s Honors Program, is the author of two books, Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading Between Literature and History (Routledge, 2013) and At Home in Diaspora: Black International Literature (U of Minnesota, 2005). She has recently published a chapter in the volume Oil Fictions, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, with an introduction by Imre Szeman. Her scholarly work has also appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, American Literature, Novel, and in other edited collections.
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