Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method

• Published in: Urban geography Vol. 41; no. 4; pp. 469 - 486
• Main Author: Cowen, Deborah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 20-04-2020; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Cities; Colonialism; Genocide; Infrastructure; jurisdiction; Nationalism; Refusal; settler colonialism; Sexuality; Slave trade; Urbanism
• ISSN: 0272-3638; 1938-2847
• DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2019.1677990

This paper investigates urban life through the contested formation of settler colonial infrastructure. Trespassing nationalist narratives, it 'follows the infrastructure' across imperial space, time and struggle, illuminating the extraordinary power of cities both in and as infrastructural systems. It tracks a set of circulations through cities across Canada and beyond, to explore how the making of 'national infrastructure' holds together seemingly disparate archives of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, of the transatlantic slave trade, and of unfree migrant racial labor regimes. Infrastructure, almost by definition, reproduces material relations, although at times in very queer ways. With an eye toward a future for urban infrastructure otherwise, I ask: what does a map of infrastructure's afterlives look like, and what is at stake in its refusal and in claims to repair?