Infrastructural Brutalism

Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure

Ebook
On sale Sep 01, 2020 | 376 Pages | 978-0-262-35872-9
How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures.

In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Paver of Modern Life 1
1 Drowned Town Fiction: The Intimate Poetics of Large Dams and Settler Common Sense 41
2 The Materiality of the Road in the “Road Movie” 117
3 Agency and Energy Regimes in Ruins: The Photography of Oil Landscapes 149
4 Death Train Narratives 193
Conclusion: Infrastructural Brutalism and Brisantic Politics 227
Notes 267
Bibliography 327
Index 361
Michael Truscello is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and General Education at Mount Royal University, Calgary.

About

How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures.

In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Paver of Modern Life 1
1 Drowned Town Fiction: The Intimate Poetics of Large Dams and Settler Common Sense 41
2 The Materiality of the Road in the “Road Movie” 117
3 Agency and Energy Regimes in Ruins: The Photography of Oil Landscapes 149
4 Death Train Narratives 193
Conclusion: Infrastructural Brutalism and Brisantic Politics 227
Notes 267
Bibliography 327
Index 361

Author

Michael Truscello is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and General Education at Mount Royal University, Calgary.

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