‘It’s a riot’: Reading infrastructure in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

This article reconsiders the riot scene central to Don DeLillo’s novella Cosmopolis by foregrounding the material infrastructure through which the protest unfolds. Rather than reading the riot as metaphor or as a critique of cybercapitalism, the argument draws from Nicole Starosielski’s work on undersea cables and Swati Chattopadhyay’s theorization of street space to frame the scene in terms of spatial and architectural disruption. By attending to how infrastructure is inhabited, repurposed and made visible, Cosmopolis offers a space to think more deeply about narratives around material infrastructure. This critical approach, which blends literary close reading with architectural analysis, offers up new analytic vocabularies for understanding the connection between narratives and the built material reality of infrastructure.