Imagining Infrastructure in Urban Jamaica

Abstract

This article presents a preliminary outline of what an infrastructural humanities might involve. We ask how the established body of work in the geohumanities, including literary geography and related fields, might incorporate the infrastructural turn that has been emerging in geography and anthropology. Studying literary and cultural imaginings of infrastructure, we suggest, extends considerations of spatiality by emphasizing how spatial connections and disconnections are constructed through material and technological means. In seeking to demonstrate the potential of attending to the imagination of infrastructure, we focus our analysis on one specific case: the infrastructure of gullies in Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston’s gullies—an extensive system of open drains meant to quickly channel rainwater to the city’s harbor—occupy an important if largely unexamined space in the Jamaican capital’s urban imaginary. In this article, we read the gully not just as a specific spatial imaginary, but as a form of infrastructure. How are Kingston’s gullies imagined in Jamaican popular music, literature, and visual culture? How do these forms of cultural production convey and evoke infrastructure’s aesthetic and affective dimensions? How do writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage with infrastructure both to assess urban dis/connections, and to reimagine these relations otherwise? We address these questions across a range of cultural texts to illustrate how a direct engagement with infrastructure might extend work on spatiality by highlighting the cultural politics of materiality and technology.