“Technocratic Fiction, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Counter-Insurgent Infrastructure”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This intervention in the discussion of literary infrastructuralism identifies technocratic fiction as an important but reactionary genre in the imagining of national infrastructure and the colonial settler state project of capitalist extractivism. Behind the technocratic texts we are looking at here is the goal of articulating and solving political, social, and economic problems through rational management effected by nation-building state-infrastructure. These texts include fiction, nonfiction, and policy documents, and they employ the stereotypical and racist figure of the Indigenous insurgent to warn against the existential economic and security threats the nation will inevitably face without taking infrastructure seriously. Richard Rohmer voices these threats in the 1973 novel Ultimatum, which can be read intertextually with Douglas Bland’s 2010 novel Uprising: both imagine infrastructure blockades, terrorism, and extractivism from the perspective of state striation and capitalist exploitation.