Victorian Infrastructures and Their Environmental Legacies, ed. Julia Ditter and Irmtraud Huber

Our special issue aims to approach this legacy in a firmly strategic presentist mode. We invite contributors to interrogate how infrastructures of the past condition our sense of political, social and ecological possibility in the present. Do they enable or hinder the potential for ecological and energetic transformations in the Anthropocene? Which alternative organisations of reality were aborted in the building of nineteenth-century infrastructures? What futurities do they make possible, and which futures do they foreclose? Literary works, historical documents and cultural texts open up spaces for examining such questions. They register and perform the cultural entanglements of infrastructures and imagine alternatives to, or futurities of, nineteenth-century infrastructural projects. Revisiting the infrastructural legacies of the nineteenth century and the paths they laid down is central to gaining a better understanding of the multivalent effects of infrastructures – socially, environmentally, culturally – and envisioning alternative pathways toward a sustainable planetary future.
For further details on how to submit, see the full CfP below.