Much of the literary criticism explicitly engaged with this term has focused on contemporary infrastructure–transportation, energy, and media networks–and contemporary literature. This includes a 2015 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies which coined the term “infrastructuralism” to describe an infrastructure-oriented approach to the historical and material. This session will instead focus on an understudied, yet transformative, era in American infrastructure: the 20th century interwar period. With its manifold changes in technologies of transportation, communication, and production this period also saw foundational shifts in policy, belief, and social structures. Exploring electricity, housing, steamships, and newsreels--amongst other infrastructural innovations--panelists will look at the ways interwar American writers incorporate and remediate the period’s infrastructure.

First, Nissa Ren Cannon’s “Camera/I: Infrastructure and the Individual in Dos Passos’ 1919” focuses on the second book in John Dos Passos’ kaleidoscopic USA Trilogy: 1919 (1932). Dos Passos is intent on making visible all the pieces of infrastructure undergirding the early 20th century. The story is mediated through numerous modern modes of communication—including ticker tape, the radio, and the newsreel. It seems pathologically compelled to name transportation and bureaucratic structures—from a paragraph-long list of the types of boats passing the coast, to the inclusion of numerous different forms of identification papers. Cannon will ask why Dos Passos uses mass communication and global infrastructures to tell a story about WWI that ultimately emphasizes the voices of individuals.

Next, in Sheila Liming’s “Haunted Frequencies: Edith Wharton, Ghosts, and Infrastructural Unease,” she discusses Edith Wharton’s interest in ghosts as an extension of the author’s anxieties about modern technological infrastructure. Born in the nineteenth century, Wharton was fascinated by the expansion of technologies like radio and electricity and concerned about how they were, in the twentieth century, rendered increasingly invisible, comprising a “ghost infrastructure” that brought changes to modern living. Wharton’s increasing interest in the ghost story as a genre culminated in her collection Ghosts (1937), the introduction of which responds to Osbert Sitwell’s charge that “ghosts went out when electricity came in.” Liming looks at Ghosts in connection with Wharton’s arguments about silence as a necessary condition for creative activity, something she sees electronic infrastructure as bent on banishing. Liming offers comparisons to Giles Deleuze’s observations about how creativity grows out of “little gaps of solitude and silence in which [the artist] might eventually find something to say.”

Finally, in “Built Environment, Psychic Cost: Chester Himes and Infrastructural Racism,” Will Clark demonstrates that Chester Himes’s novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) speaks specifically to the period when housing infrastructure became one of the signal methods in which U.S. policy magnified racial and economic marginalization in the built environment. Through Himes’s racialized infrastructure, Clark revisits housing’s exclusionary nature in 1940s Los Angeles, and its role in dividing Chicanx, Japanese, and Black residents who otherwise shared political interests. Putting Himes in conversation with Richard Rothstein’s history of redlining, The Color of Law and Eric Schickler’s Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, which shows how organizers combated the white supremacist arm of the Democratic Party, Clark details how literature exposes the psychic harm caused by interwar housing policies, and suggests that literary representation provides guidelines for combating the failure of contemporary infrastructure discourse to intervene in the century’s long housing inequities.

The technology, communications, and policies explored by Cannon, Liming, and Clark cast long shadows onto contemporary life: from our stagnant housing market, to the noise from our 24/7 media landscape. The panel will explore questions about interwar American literature with continued relevance in the 21st century: from how literature speaks to the inequalities created by our built environment; to how fiction manages the disruption caused by novel infrastructures; and, perhaps most centrally, how writers make the invisible structures of infrastructure visible. Alison Maas, whose work focuses on 20th century port infrastructure, will preside, assuring that each panelist remains within their allotted eighteen minutes and leaving at least fifteen minutes for discussion.