Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930

«For Davies, infrastructure in colonial fiction persists as a reminder of the economic unevenness inherent within the project of imperialism. Drawing on a range of thinkers (J.A. Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, Edward Soja, Edward Said, amongst others), he argues that the inequality produced by global imperial capital takes on a distinct, and contradictory, spatial form in the colonies: underdevelopment coexists with development in these spaces as the shanty town is never too far from the developed roads, bridges, railways.»

«Davies insists that an infrastructural mode of reading offers the only true record of resistance - a claim grounded in his privileging of a materialist/economic lens. Taking this interplay between real and imagined geographies a step further, he argues that infrastructures in fiction directly shape and organize spaces outside.»

«[T]his a theoretically enlightening book that broadens our conceptual understanding of the multiple materialist registers on which infrastructures operate in colonial fiction.»

(Niyati Sharma, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 54, Number 6 2019)