Wayward Plots: Public Transport and Abolition Narratology in Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the infrastructural imagination of Namwali Serpell’s grief narrative The Furrows. Building on existing research about public transport, carceral geography, and the infrastructural uncanny, it draws attention to the pivotal role of schools, prisons, and airports as well as the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in Serpell’s novel about a missing brother and his adult double. This enigmatic disappearance and several key scenes related to civic networks fit into the broader anti-Black condition Christina Sharpe has labeled the wake, as the narrative’s use of maritime imagery underlines. Yet the novel also performs a defiant form of “wake work” by deploying literary techniques involving minor characters, subplots, and foreshadowing that scramble the narrative’s own logistical operations in the service of an insurgent mode of formalism this article proposes calling “abolition narratology.”