I co-edited (with Wesley Attewell and Emily Mitchell-Eaton, and with editorial wisdom and assistance from Monica Kim) this issue of Radical History Review, due out in October. I am really excited for this to circulate. Taken together our introduction, the two roundtables, the image essay, and the six research articles demonstrate the importance for historians to develop a theory of infrastructure that tends to the fundamentally spatial dimensions of struggle, organizing, and survival. Moreover, the issue encourages scholars to engage with the contours of political struggle across the lifespans of infrastructure projects themselves, as these systems play such a crucial-yet-dynamic role in the reproduction of communities across a range of scales.
I am especially excited because it looks like Duke University Press has decided to include it in their marketing materials and at their conference tables, so hopefully the contributions will reach a wide interdisciplinary readership.
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation-building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, more localized scale of infrastructural production and relation-building—both within and beyond the bounds of the nation-state—contributors to this issue resituate ostensibly disparate, small sites as key to larger political struggles and frame everyday forms of ‘getting by’ as resistance.