Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930
Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930
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帝国基础设施和殖民文学中的空间阻力，1880-1930
DOI：
10.3726/b11015
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Davies
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Davies
1880 年至 1930 年间，大英帝国巨大的基础设施发展促进了全球大部分地区融入伊曼纽尔·沃勒斯坦 (Immanuel Wallerstein) 等人所说的资本主义“世界体系”。这一时期的殖民文学在记录这一巨大的扩张时，反复引用帝国的基础设施来理解其所处的不同地理位置。帝国的物质体现在本书中大量涌现。铁路和火车、电报线和电报、道路和桥梁、轮船和航运线、运河和其他形式的灌溉、军营、殖民地平房和其他类型的殖民城市建筑——所有这些基础设施线路打破了景观，并塑造了文学对殖民空间的描绘和生产。为了分析殖民文学中帝国的这些物理体现，本论文开发了一种称为基础设施阅读的方法论阅读实践。这种阅读策略植根于“基础设施”一词的二元而又相互联系的使用，是分析这些文学叙事中相互维持的关系的关键工具。它关注文本中的基础设施，无论是物理的还是象征性的，以便挖掘文本的基础设施，无论是地理的、社会的还是经济的——即支撑英国帝国扩张的世界体系的物质条件。这种方法论适用于许多殖民作家，包括南非的 H. Rider Haggard、Olive Schreiner、William Plomer 和 John Buchan，以及印度的 Flora Annie Steel、E.M. Forster、Edmund Candler 和 Edward Thompson。结果表明，殖民小说中流传的基础设施网络几乎总是与某种形式的反帝国抵抗有关，其表现形式包括意识形态焦虑、限制和沉默，以及对帝国控制和资本主义积累的更直接的反对和暴力反抗行为。在此过程中，本文展示了这种文学文化领域和嵌入其中的抵抗是如何被资本主义世界体系的基础设施塑造的，又如何反过来塑造了资本主义世界体系的基础设施。
Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire’s vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into what Immanuel Wallerstein and others have called the capitalist 'world-system'. Colonial literature written throughout this period, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cites imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various geographies in which it is set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow and other kinds of colonial urban architecture—all of these infrastructural lines break up the landscape and give shape to the literature’s depiction and production of colonial space. In order to analyse these physical embodiments of empire in colonial literature, this thesis develops a methodological reading practice called infrastructural reading. Rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word 'infrastructure', this reading strategy works as a critical tool for analysing a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within these literary narratives. It focuses on the infrastructures in the text, both physical and symbolic, in order to excavate the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or economic—namely, the material conditions of the world-system that underpinned Britain's imperial expansion. This methodology is applied to a number of colonial authors including H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, William Plomer and John Buchan in South Africa and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster, Edmund Candler and Edward Thompson in India. The results show that the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance, manifestations that include ideological anxieties, limitations and silences, as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation. In so doing, the thesis demonstrates how this literary-cultural terrain and the resistance embedded within it has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the infrastructure of the capitalist world-system.