Writer, Researcher, Editor, and Translator
Based in Berlin, Germany
Interstates:
Infrastructure in California Fiction and Film, 1956–92
Dissertation Project
The imaginary of the interstate is the imaginary of noir. The project of national automobilization undertaken with the Interstate Highway System was supposed to deliver the United States into a bright transport future. But what emerged during the interstate era—that is, the years during which the interstate was officially under construction, 1956–1992—was a new climate of darkness: an ambient darkness, a systemic darkness, that seemed to spread as determinedly as the superhighways.
Wayne Thiebaud, 1979
Interstates: Infrastructure in California Fiction and Film, 1956–92 develops a critical historical framework with which to analyze moments in culture and media of the second half of the twentieth century that aestheticize the unique space of the automobile superhighway. This infrastructural methodology tracks manifestations of an interstate imaginary across a transmedial generic tradition of California noir by placing a popular cultural archive of literary texts and Hollywood movies in conversation with architectural manifestos, engineering handbooks, and films produced to manufacture consent for the interstate. Interstates builds on scholarly accounts of the road’s cultural significance with a specifically historical, infrastructural analysis of four central case studies: Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novella, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Joan Didion’s breakout novel Play It as It Lays (1970); the Hollywood blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); and the Black sci-fi classic Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia Butler. These four case studies form the core of the project’s four analytical chapters, which are each themed around a different feature of superhighway design: systems, signs, cloverleaf interchanges, and ramps. Interstates argues that it is the California-native, transmedial genre of noir, rather than the well-studied tradition of road novels and films, that reflects and responds to infrastructural changes in automobility inaugurated by the interstate.
This dissertation aims to extend scholarship on post-1945 American culture and critical studies of infrastructure, as well as on the popular genre of noir. Furthermore, with its noirish cultural history of the interstate, Interstates hopes to contribute to recent scholarship in American studies that mobilizes the topic of infrastructure to interrogate the overlap between the neoliberal state and environmental degradation. The specific intersection of noir aesthetics and public works in late-capitalist culture form part of a reckoning with the infrastructural imaginary of the New Deal era at the dawn of the Neoliberal Order. Specifically, these texts reinterpret aspects of noir narrative from the first half of the twentieth century—such as conspiracy, complicity, and the production of centrifugal space—to expose the material foundations of the emerging late-capitalist social formation, which they imagine to be an outcome of, rather than deviation from, the liberal-democratic interventions of the 1930–1950s. Lastly, Interstates argues for the construction of the interstate as an epoch of American culture that speaks to a transitional—or inter—state between distinct regimes in capitalist production and American state power.