TP 6: 'Race as Infrastructure' and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Laura Bieger
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524611401

The project examines the relationship between two world-building infrastructures: "race" and genre. Building on the research group’s praxeological concept of infrastructure, it develops (a) an understanding of "race" is a structure of assumptions, rules and habits that, by categorizing human life, creates an unequal distribution of vulnerability; in order to (b) show how literature is involved in the creation of this infrastructure by developing and circulating ideas of the human - and has therefore become an arena for its questioning, combating and reformatting. Antagonistic dynamics of this kind form the center; the TP assumes that they originate in the transformation of physical into literary practices. How have the forms of resistance generated within racist orders worked against the mechanisms of classification that make "race" infrastructurally effective? What alternative infrastructures have emerged in the process? What can we learn from these dynamics for the systematic dismantling of racism, in which the TP wants to participate? These questions are theorized in a framework project and explicated in three sub-projects (UP). The latter is done by examining three forms of resistance that emerged in the USA in response to the infrastructural racism on which American society is founded: the Underground Railroad, an informal aid network for escape from slavery, and its connection to the slave narrative as the driving force behind abolitionist action, including organized escape aid (UP 1); "passing" (commonly understood as the "passing for white" of people who are considered black by virtue of racist categorization) and its connection to the novel of passing as an instrument for archiving this notoriously intangible form of resistance (UP 2); and Afrofuturism and its connection to speculative fiction as an instrument for producing an alternative cultural memory and new forms of community and action. In the interplay of the three case studies, racist orders become tangible as permeated by historically dynamic forms of resistance that take shape in the realm of the secret and/or intangible and extend their infrastructural operations into artistic negotiations that are fundamentally conditioned by literature.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5710: Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply