Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn

Abstract

Abstract:This essay analyzes the function of speculative fiction in the ecosystem of literary attempts to understand the imbrication of infrastructure with racial and colonial violence. While the task of making infrastructural violence apprehensible may seem more suited to realism (the literary mode designed to make legible "what is"), I trace a largely unrecognized strand in Johan Galtung's original theorization of structural violence to argue for the importance of "what is not": the potential realizations of human flourishing that are foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence—potential realizations that can only be grasped through an act of speculation. I make this argument through a reading of Toni Cade Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, which begins in a mostly realist mode that captures empire's violent distortions of Black and Native lives through infrastructural violence before transitioning into a more overtly speculative mode towards the end of the novel. Bambara's formal enactment of the speculative turn, I argue, evokes the potential realizations of Black and Native life that have been foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence and entrains readers to see the world not just as it is, or as it could be, but as it might have been and might yet be. I close the essay with a discussion of the broader speculative turn in anticolonial Black women's fiction, suggesting that both the rise of speculative elements in more realist novels and the efflorescence of Black speculative fiction can be seen as deploying the affordances of speculation to capture the realities of colonial infrastructural violence in the US.