by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger,
Esther Adeyemo, Natalie Erkel
The project examines the relationship between two world-making infrastructures: race and genre. Building on the praxeological approach of our group, it (a) develops an understanding of race as a framework of preconceptions, rules, and customs that, in categorizing of human life, brings about an unequal distribution of vulnerability; to (b) demonstrate how literature, in forming and circulating conceptions of the human, participates in the creation of this infrastructure while also playing a prominent role in questioning, combating, and reformatting it.
Antagonistic dynamics of this kind are central for us. We posit that they originate in the transformation of bodily into literary practices, to ask: How have the mechanisms of classification that make race infrastructurally effective been resisted from within racial orders? What alternative infrastructures have thus emerged? What lessons can be learned from these dynamics for the systematic dismantling of racism?
Project 6 consists of a frame project (“Genre as Infrastructure and the Specter of Race” ), of subproject 1 (“The Literary Engines of the Underground Railroad” ), subproject 2 („The Novel of Passing as an Archive of Infrastructural Resistance”), and of subproject 3 (“Black Speculative Fiction as an Infrastructure of Afrofuturist Art and Community Building”). In the interplay of the case studies—which are flanked by theoretical work on genre and archive as infrastructure—racial order becomes tangible as permeated by historically dynamic forms of resistance that take shape in the realm of the secret and/or intangible and extend their infrastructuring effects into artistic negotiations that are fundamentally conditioned by literature.
Frame-Project
by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger (PI)
The infrastructural dimension of race has so far been studied solely in sociotechnological terms—even though aesthetic procedures like form-giving, sensory-affective perception and the collective judgment thereof are crucial in generating the categories and conventions on which our world is based. Foundations of this kind are not built through interventions in physical space, but through symbolic acts like the painterly representation of landscape or the literary imagination of human interiority. Or rather, through the conventions that emerge in the repetition and ordering of such acts (e.g., in grouping similar forms into genres and erecting artistic systems based on them).
The aim of this sub-project is to track how these ordering principles and processes partake in the unequal distribution of vulnerability that characterizes race as infrastructure. Drawing on recent work on literary and affective infrastructures, ontology as forgotten infrastructure, genres as fields of knowledge and world-making agents, it tracks how genre subtends the organization of knowledge. And while its theoretical stakes are not restricted to literary genres, the formative role of the latter in the categorization of human life puts them center stage.
The project departs from the following set of assumptions: Since literature is a symbol-based practice, literary infrastructures are also symbolic. But symbols can only exert their communicative function through concrete media. Literary infrastructures are thus by default material. And while scholars have not paid much attention to the materiality of genre so far, it is indispensable to genre as infrastructure. The project aims to conceptualize this function along three intersecting lines: (1) the interplay between symbolic and material, tangible and intangible, imaginary and affective components of genre; (2) the capacity of paratexts to function as linking elements within and between artistic and media systems, and (3) the capacity of genre to function as archive.
See also:
Subproject 1
by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger (PI)
The flight network known as the Underground Railroad, which helped an estimated 135.000 enslaved persons to escape from bondage, had a literary substructure and that substructure was the slave narrative. Helping runaways was so fraught with danger that no trace could be left. Knowledge was hence stored in bodies, and helpers only knew about their immediate segment of the clandestine operation—and left to imagine the rest. What they imagined was fueled by the many slave narratives that were circulating at the time—generating and disseminating not only knowledge but also affective bonds. And even though participation in the Underground Railroad was much lower than commonly assumed, for those involved in it, it held the promise of a different, better world.
That promise was transformed when the flight network had outlived its use: After the Civil War, the Underground Railroad it became a multi- and transmedia infrastructure of commemoration. This project locates the engine of this development in the genre of slave narrative. In the post-bellum period, it (1) subtends the formation of a cultural memory of slavery, with the Underground Railroad as a virtual battleground; while (2) proliferating into the neo-slave narrative to challenge the commemoration of slavery crystallized in the popular view of the Underground Railroad with new forms of storytelling.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Esther Adeyemo (Phd candidate)
This project examines the passing novel as a site in which the infrastructural logic of race is both reproduced and unsettled. Rather than approaching passing as an individual act of deception or identity crisis, it understands it as a practice embedded within the broader systems that organize social life. In this sense, race operates as an infrastructure: a set of norms, perceptions, and conventions that shape how bodies are seen, classified, and valued.
Focusing on a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century passing narratives, the project argues that these texts function as archives of infrastructural resistance. They not only depict racial passing, but formally register the pressures of legibility, the instability of categorization, and the limits of recognition. In doing so, they make visible how racial knowledge is produced, circulated, and contested.
Particular attention is given to the relationship between embodiment and narration, tracing how the “passing” body emerges not as a fixed identity but as a site of negotiation shaped by regimes of visibility and social expectation. By reading the passing novel as both a literary form and an archival practice, the project highlights how alternative ways of knowing and being take shape from within, rather than outside, racialized infrastructures.
In foregrounding these dynamics, the project contributes to a broader understanding of how literature participates in both the maintenance and transformation of racial order.
See also:
Subproject 3
by Natalie Erkel (PhD candidate)
While the term “Afrofuturism” was coined in the 1990s to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture” (Dery 1993: 736), the practice itself predates this linguistic label by over a century. Rather than a new phenomenon, it represents a long-standing tradition of “radical imagination” (Kelley 2002), evidenced in Black speculative texts such as Martin Delany’s Blake; or The Huts of America (1859–1862). This lineage has consistently envisioned self-determination through various modes, including utopian world-building, speculative worlds, revisionist history, and alternative temporalities (Yasek 2015; Zamalin 2019). The naming of the movement in 1993 simply codified these existing intellectual threads, catalyzing more intentional, collective efforts toward alternative community-building (Nelson 2002; Womack 2013). As a critical and aesthetic framework, Afrofuturism developed against the backdrop of persistent racial discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era, exposing systemic racism and the “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2016). Despite an ideology of “colorblindness,” this period saw the rise of the “New Jim Crow” (Alexander 2010), characterized by mass incarceration, “legal lynchings” (Stevenson 2014), and infrastructural inequalities such as limited access to “health and education, premature death, . . . and impoverishment” (Hartman 2008: 6).
This project examines Afrofuturism’s connections to Black speculative fiction and visionary forms like manifestos, focusing on its infrastructuring dynamics and specifically its potential for alternative community-building. Centrally, the study relies on Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) understanding of infrastructure as a relational concept, defined by its use rather than by inherent characteristics. Their framework emphasizes that infrastructure emerges through organized practices, prompting the critical question: “when—not what—is an infrastructure?” (113). By utilizing “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker and Star 1999) to bring these relational networks into focus, the study pursues two primary objectives: first, analyzing artistic representations of infrastructures and coexistence in Black speculative worlds; and second, reconstructing the networks that connect various nodes such as representational forms, characters, artifacts, artists, and recipients.
See also:
by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger,
Esther Adeyemo, Natalie Erkel
The project examines the relationship between two world-making infrastructures: race and genre. Building on the praxeological approach of our group, it (a) develops an understanding of race as a framework of preconceptions, rules, and customs that, in categorizing of human life, brings about an unequal distribution of vulnerability; to (b) demonstrate how literature, in forming and circulating conceptions of the human, participates in the creation of this infrastructure while also playing a prominent role in questioning, combating, and reformatting it.
Antagonistic dynamics of this kind are central for us. We posit that they originate in the transformation of bodily into literary practices, to ask: How have the mechanisms of classification that make race infrastructurally effective been resisted from within racial orders? What alternative infrastructures have thus emerged? What lessons can be learned from these dynamics for the systematic dismantling of racism?
Project 6 consists of a frame project (“Genre as Infrastructure and the Specter of Race” ), of subproject 1 (“The Literary Engines of the Underground Railroad” ), subproject 2 („The Novel of Passing as an Archive of Infrastructural Resistance”), and of subproject 3 (“Black Speculative Fiction as an Infrastructure of Afrofuturist Art and Community Building”). In the interplay of the case studies—which are flanked by theoretical work on genre and archive as infrastructure—racial order becomes tangible as permeated by historically dynamic forms of resistance that take shape in the realm of the secret and/or intangible and extend their infrastructuring effects into artistic negotiations that are fundamentally conditioned by literature.
Frame-Project
by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger (PI)
The infrastructural dimension of race has so far been studied solely in sociotechnological terms—even though aesthetic procedures like form-giving, sensory-affective perception and the collective judgment thereof are crucial in generating the categories and conventions on which our world is based. Foundations of this kind are not built through interventions in physical space, but through symbolic acts like the painterly representation of landscape or the literary imagination of human interiority. Or rather, through the conventions that emerge in the repetition and ordering of such acts (e.g., in grouping similar forms into genres and erecting artistic systems based on them).
The aim of this sub-project is to track how these ordering principles and processes partake in the unequal distribution of vulnerability that characterizes race as infrastructure. Drawing on recent work on literary and affective infrastructures, ontology as forgotten infrastructure, genres as fields of knowledge and world-making agents, it tracks how genre subtends the organization of knowledge. And while its theoretical stakes are not restricted to literary genres, the formative role of the latter in the categorization of human life puts them center stage.
The project departs from the following set of assumptions: Since literature is a symbol-based practice, literary infrastructures are also symbolic. But symbols can only exert their communicative function through concrete media. Literary infrastructures are thus by default material. And while scholars have not paid much attention to the materiality of genre so far, it is indispensable to genre as infrastructure. The project aims to conceptualize this function along three intersecting lines: (1) the interplay between symbolic and material, tangible and intangible, imaginary and affective components of genre; (2) the capacity of paratexts to function as linking elements within and between artistic and media systems, and (3) the capacity of genre to function as archive.
See also:
Subproject 1
by Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger (PI)
The flight network known as the Underground Railroad, which helped an estimated 135.000 enslaved persons to escape from bondage, had a literary substructure and that substructure was the slave narrative. Helping runaways was so fraught with danger that no trace could be left. Knowledge was hence stored in bodies, and helpers only knew about their immediate segment of the clandestine operation—and left to imagine the rest. What they imagined was fueled by the many slave narratives that were circulating at the time—generating and disseminating not only knowledge but also affective bonds. And even though participation in the Underground Railroad was much lower than commonly assumed, for those involved in it, it held the promise of a different, better world.
That promise was transformed when the flight network had outlived its use: After the Civil War, the Underground Railroad it became a multi- and transmedia infrastructure of commemoration. This project locates the engine of this development in the genre of slave narrative. In the post-bellum period, it (1) subtends the formation of a cultural memory of slavery, with the Underground Railroad as a virtual battleground; while (2) proliferating into the neo-slave narrative to challenge the commemoration of slavery crystallized in the popular view of the Underground Railroad with new forms of storytelling.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Esther Adeyemo (Phd candidate)
This project examines the passing novel as a site in which the infrastructural logic of race is both reproduced and unsettled. Rather than approaching passing as an individual act of deception or identity crisis, it understands it as a practice embedded within the broader systems that organize social life. In this sense, race operates as an infrastructure: a set of norms, perceptions, and conventions that shape how bodies are seen, classified, and valued.
Focusing on a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century passing narratives, the project argues that these texts function as archives of infrastructural resistance. They not only depict racial passing, but formally register the pressures of legibility, the instability of categorization, and the limits of recognition. In doing so, they make visible how racial knowledge is produced, circulated, and contested.
Particular attention is given to the relationship between embodiment and narration, tracing how the “passing” body emerges not as a fixed identity but as a site of negotiation shaped by regimes of visibility and social expectation. By reading the passing novel as both a literary form and an archival practice, the project highlights how alternative ways of knowing and being take shape from within, rather than outside, racialized infrastructures.
In foregrounding these dynamics, the project contributes to a broader understanding of how literature participates in both the maintenance and transformation of racial order.
See also:
Subproject 3
by Natalie Erkel (PhD candidate)
While the term “Afrofuturism” was coined in the 1990s to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture” (Dery 1993: 736), the practice itself predates this linguistic label by over a century. Rather than a new phenomenon, it represents a long-standing tradition of “radical imagination” (Kelley 2002), evidenced in Black speculative texts such as Martin Delany’s Blake; or The Huts of America (1859–1862). This lineage has consistently envisioned self-determination through various modes, including utopian world-building, speculative worlds, revisionist history, and alternative temporalities (Yasek 2015; Zamalin 2019). The naming of the movement in 1993 simply codified these existing intellectual threads, catalyzing more intentional, collective efforts toward alternative community-building (Nelson 2002; Womack 2013). As a critical and aesthetic framework, Afrofuturism developed against the backdrop of persistent racial discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era, exposing systemic racism and the “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2016). Despite an ideology of “colorblindness,” this period saw the rise of the “New Jim Crow” (Alexander 2010), characterized by mass incarceration, “legal lynchings” (Stevenson 2014), and infrastructural inequalities such as limited access to “health and education, premature death, . . . and impoverishment” (Hartman 2008: 6).
This project examines Afrofuturism’s connections to Black speculative fiction and visionary forms like manifestos, focusing on its infrastructuring dynamics and specifically its potential for alternative community-building. Centrally, the study relies on Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) understanding of infrastructure as a relational concept, defined by its use rather than by inherent characteristics. Their framework emphasizes that infrastructure emerges through organized practices, prompting the critical question: “when—not what—is an infrastructure?” (113). By utilizing “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker and Star 1999) to bring these relational networks into focus, the study pursues two primary objectives: first, analyzing artistic representations of infrastructures and coexistence in Black speculative worlds; and second, reconstructing the networks that connect various nodes such as representational forms, characters, artifacts, artists, and recipients.
See also: