Come hear from Prof. William Viestenz explore the hidden social, political, and environmental ramifications of the ongoing "infrastructural turn" in recent cultural productions!
Following his presentation there will be an open discussion. So come with questions!
This paper argues that recent Catalan and Galician cultural production has made ‘visible’ the infrastructural turn that has emerged of late in literary studies following two decades of focused attention in the social sciences. Indeed, infrastructure is a particularly profitable vehicle for discussing what normally fades into the landscape to such an extent that it practically becomes unseen: though highways, canals, reservoirs, and railways surround everyday life and indeed make socialization, commerce, and global modernity possible, they are banal to the point of merging with the natural landscape, only garnering attention when they cease functioning. Such hiddenness in plain sight attends etymologically to the term itself: these are structures that “lie below”, at an infra-level, atop of which “real” life courses and unfurls. This paper proposes that Maica Rafecas’s El setembre i la nit (2021), Rodrigo Sorgoyen’s As bestas (2022), and Carla Simón’s Alcarràs (2022) each confirm Britton-Purdy’s assertion that human beings are an “infrastructure species”: anthropotechnic creatures who fashion the world through networked structures, which in turn condition the horizons of possibility for politics, the social, and humanity’s orientation towards non-human life and objects. In short, infrastructure produces the material and political worlds that determine what type of species the human being constitutes. In the works listed above, competing ecological, economic, and cultural demands over the technosphere bring to light how the infrastructure turn in Iberian Studies has the potential to suture together a host of other emerging themes in the field: tourism, environmental studies, object-oriented analysis, and returns to the rural.
Originally published at environmentalhumanities.nd.edu.