The Slow Violence of Infrastructure

The ecological, economic, and political effects of infrastructure have been a central trope of scholarship on the Anthropocene and planetary change. Foregrounding colonial histories and postcolonial violence, this chapter reads infrastructure through plantation logics and vice versa. It attends to ecological consequences of violent, populist agitations against colonial underdevelopment in Assam, agitations where issues concerning infrastructure were a central pivot. The chapter then turns to the cascading repercussions of outcomes of these agitations, showing how they manifest in the form of a slow violence, a violence that is accretive and gradual, conditioning livability for a landscape’s denizens, both human and other-than-human. Addressing ecological and political effects of infrastructure, the chapter develops a wider infrastructural ontology attentive to a Plantationocene’s travails, both present and past.