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

ABSTRACT

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?

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• settler colonialism
• cities
• jurisdiction

Acknowledgments

Thank you to David Wilson, Kevin Ward and the team at Urban Geography for the invitation to give the 2019 plenary lecture. I am deeply grateful to Malini Ranganathan and Kate Derickson for their generous and challenging interlocution. Dialogue with Alissa Trotz makes the best parts of this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. http://www.idlenomore.ca/secwepemc_women_warrior_society_say_no_to_kinder_morgan_pipeline.

2. See the Tiny House Warriors at: http://tinyhousewarriors.com.

3. The 1882 Report of the CPR Royal Commission documents the long trail of British advocates for a transcontinental rail between Britain’s North American colonies on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

4. Digital access to the Book of Negroes is now available here: https://novascotia.ca/archives/Africanns/BN.asp.

5. J.S. Crawford to F. Oliver, Winnipeg, 2 December 1910, File 72552 Pt 2.

6. Municipal Council of Edmonton to W. Laurier, Edmonton, 18 April 1911, File 72552 Pt 3.

7. Martin-McGuire (1998) “First Nation land surrenders on the Prairies, 1896–1911.” Prepared for the Indian Claims Commission.

8. All of these transactions are documented in Martin-McGuire, P. (1998).

9. Commons Debates, 1882, vol. xii, p. 1477.

10. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/a-quiz-for-joe-oliver-how-many-died-building-cpr/article1357931/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.