Novel Infrastructures: Urban Literary Forms in Contemporary Lagos, Johannesburg, and Mumbai

My dissertation explores how the contemporary world novel represents urban infrastructural change in rapidly developing postcolonial cities like Lagos, Mumbai, and Johannesburg from the last decade of the 20th century to the present, a period of hyper-accelerated infrastructural and ideological reconstruction after the formal end of colonialism. I argue that the representation of urban infrastructure in the novel functions as a media architecture internal to the text that delimits character mobilities and organizes narrative development. These literary techniques, which I call “novel infrastructures,” function adjunctively with real surrounding infrastructures to convert social processes into narrative. I thus read contemporary global novels infrastructurally, analyzing how they thematize and contribute materially to processes of (re)-segregation, eco-degradation, and urbanization, in order to understand how the novel formally changes as cities change.