:<i>The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment</i>

The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure offers a timely contribution to the burgeoning "infrastructural turn" within literary studies.The editors and contributors of the volume aim to "closely read the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure together" (2), bridging two strands of infrastructural inquiry that are often separated by disciplinary boundaries."Reading," here, operates as both a technical methodology specific to literary studies and as a more generalized interpretive mode; some of the essays take up infrastructural thematics in literary texts (novels, memoirs, travel narratives), while others "read" infrastructural formations and our affective responses to them.The full title of the volume constitutes a string of capacious, overlapping terms.In the hands of less capable editors, such an assortment of conceptual frames might have produced an overly loose or muddled study.But the volume is astutely structured; each of its three sections (on race, affect, and environment) offers a distinct lens through which to explore larger questions of infrastructural aesthetics, while several points of intervention run across the full set of contributions.Perhaps the most prominent of these through lines comes in a shared commitment to countering the so-called visibility thesis, "a paradigm articulated by Susan Leigh Star in which infrastructure becomes visible or detectable only or primarily through extraordinary collapse, failure, breakdown, or glitch" (3).Ramesh Mallipeddi's essay on roadbuilding in colonial Jamaica and Barbados, for example, shows how the successful expansion of such infrastructural projects can render them thoroughly visible, especially to those they exclude or exploit.Janice Ho's essay on the experience of infrastructural