ABSTRACT

This essay considers the relations between physical infrastructure and the politics of literary form in Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014). Although the novel initially seems to suggest that literature is irrelevant to the context of infrastructural dysfunction that it depicts, I argue that Tram 83 articulates a specific (yet highly circumscribed) role for the literary. In order to make this case, the novel’s improvisational form is read as an attempt to represent what the anthropologist Brian Larkin has called the “conceptually unruly” nature of infrastructure. This unruliness expresses itself in a lack of distinction between humans and infrastructure, which in turn causes a severe curtailment of certain kinds of political agency in the novel. Whereas traditional literary forms are shown by Mujila to be inadequate to representing and critiquing this particular infrastructural context, the novel retains a latent commitment to the power of the literary, one that eschews traditional ideas about form in favor of a more broadly construed and intermedial literary practice. This persistence of the literary, I conclude, raises important questions concerning the role of form in contemporary literary cultures.

摘要

本文探讨了 Fiston Mwanza Mujila 的Tram 83 (2014) 中物理基础设施与文学形式政治之间的关系。虽然小说最初似乎暗示文学与它所描绘的基础设施功能障碍的背景无关，但我认为有轨电车 83为文学阐明了一个特定的（但高度受限的）角色。为了证明这一点，小说的即兴形式被解读为试图代表人类学家布赖恩·拉金（Brian Larkin）所称的基础设施“概念上不守规矩”的性质。这种不守规矩表现在人类和基础设施之间缺乏区分，这反过来又导致小说中某些政治机构的严重缩减。尽管穆吉拉认为传统文学形式不足以代表和批评这种特定的基础设施背景，但这部小说保留了对文学力量的潜在承诺，它避开了关于形式的传统观念，转而采用更广泛的解释和中间文学实践。我总结说，文学的这种坚持，