Nick Earhart will begin by examining the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile concretized waterway that runs the course of Los Angeles. Beginning with a brief overview of the river’s history, Earhart’s paper, “Common Currents: The Cultures of the Los Angeles River,” is part of a larger book project framing the LA river as the subject of significant political, cultural, and environmental attention since the 1970s. Earhart examines the works of visual artists such as muralist Judy Baca, poets Lewis MacAdams and Luis J. Rodríguez, eco artists Helen and Newton Harrison, and graffiti writer Chaz Bojórquez to demonstrate how significant the LA river is to urbanist debates of ecology and public space. Earhart shows that while these works originate from distinct discursive locations, they find common cause on the Los Angeles River. This paper suggests that city infrastructures present clear affordances for cultural-studies scholars, drawing together disparate concerns in time and space, along conflicted yet shared terrain.

Building on Earhart’s historical overview of LA’s water infrastructure, Skijler Hutson’s paper, “Infrastruction Anxiety: Visibility, Failure, and Los Angeles' Architecture Aesthetic,” shifts focus to one of the biggest failures of twentieth century American infrastructure: the St. Francis Dam disaster. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam killed over 450 people when it failed, flooding the San Francisquito Canyon with a 140 foot high wave, resulting in a shift in Los Angeles’ architecture from the proud Art Deco style of earlier public works projects to the banality we recognize today. Concerned by the possibility of a similar disaster, the city quickly moved to reinforce and, in turn, cover up its infrastructure projects, including the Mulholland Dam which was covered with approximately 300,000 cubic yards of dirt. Hutson connects this peculiar moment in the history of Los Angeles waterways to a genre of LA literature that seeks to uncover the disorienting and often invisible forces structuring the city.

Finally, in “The Literary Histories of the Los Angeles Freeway Novel,” Lauren White considers the political aesthetics of LA's freeway novel. Reframing road novels as early highway novels, she explores how the mostly white-male authored genre celebrated America’s “pioneering” spirit and American progress through roadtrip narratives. Originating in the wake of Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act, LA freeway novels, a new iteration of the genre, strayed from roadtrip plots, offering, instead, an anxiety ridden reflection on living within the freeways surrounding the city. White traces the development of the freeway novel from the 70s into the 90s, drawing on novels by women of color to show how it became a genre overtly critical of American empire and its highways.

This special session topic is timely: it coincides with an increasing recognition within literary studies regarding the aesthetic and cultural importance of infrastructure. Considering Los Angeles’ desire to build a more sustainable future through projects like the restoration of the LA River and the capping of its freeways with parks, these presentations encourage the audience to question how we inhabit space. This panel offers a range of perspectives by featuring Angelenos at different stages in their careers across three departments: English, Visual Culture, and Architecture and Urban Design. Together, these papers intervene in recent conversations about what critical infrastructure studies can offer literary studies, asking both how literature can shape our understanding of a city’s infrastructure and how infrastructure shapes narratives of Los Angeles. Given our panel’s focus on LA, the 2027 convention would be the perfect venue for this special session.