Reading “Histories,” in Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, (2017), I am reminded of the sense of proximity at a distance with which Ned Rossiter describes the experience of infrastructure. While he is discussing the experience and perhaps politics of the data center, as necessarily detached from its users in order that it is seen as an infrastructure for an activity, rather than that activity’s object, this could also be used as a frame for thinking about the imaginaries and politics of the colonial and post-colonial infrastructure of Britain.

Specifically this is to ask if it is the ability to understand infrastructure as ‘elsewhere,’ or at best as only of parallel significance, that motivates and mediates the British self-narration of colony and slavery as detached from its own sense of self? Is it the separation of function and consequence — making effects selective — that constitutes the movement expressive of and enabled by infrastructure which also affords a politics of denial of the structural consistency of British self-narration? That is, is it infrastructure that allows the contradiction of the institution, or an instituted set of beliefs, to exist fully and without collapse? (Here I’m also thinking of Simon Gikandi, Slavery and The Culture of Taste, and an interview with John Lanchester on his book, The Wall. )

This is not simply a case of revealing a contradiction in a system in relation to its foundational imaginaries, but pointing to how, through infrastructure as a means of (in this case colonial) world building (the Atlantic slave trade, plantations and slave labour, infrastructures of resource, etc.), people subjected to and within that world are also treated as part of that infrastructure. In this way, infrastructure both allows structural denial, and sustains a narrative of separation and disposability.

One of the great contradictions of the institutional idea of nation is that certain taxonomies of bodies and appearances contain within them an inherent claim upon that certain territory, a claim that is understood in theory as universally applicable. At the level of representation, a core component of the idea of nation, this claim is widely shown to be based on limiting exclusionary, uni-perspectival and motivated categorisations inextricable from the development and expansion of colonial and enlightenment projects. An infrastructural lens might add to this by suggesting how such claims are based on the function of these categories in the specific deployment and disposal of others at its symbolic and actual edge. Eddo-Lodge:

“Despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise, Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences.” (2017, 15)

Following Eddo-Lodge, that slavery’s toil took place for the most part in the colonies, and with enslaved people inherited as a property, implied that British slave-owners needed to have little experience or connection to its reality. The same cannot be said for those people who came to Britain under the understanding that the colonial connection to the “motherland” would mean a place within it. For example Dr Harold Moody, a Caribbean man who fought for Britain in WWI, and who came to Bristol in 1904 to gain a medical education. Once trained he was repeatedly refused work by Hospitals and Charities in the capital, for no other reason that race.

Distance enabled a denial of the disposability of those lives, bodies and labour of the enslaved at the core of British history of the period. And when those people ‘returned’ along the lines of those colonial infrastructures which had displaced them, for the British fantasy of island self-sufficiency and class organisation to be maintained, the presence, and the history of connection needed to be ridded through racist violence, policing and structural barring from work, property and participation. “By 1958, Nottingham’s black population numbered 2,500. But a decade of legislation explicitly welcoming Commonwealth citizens to Britain had not changed attitudes on the ground.” (23)

With echoes of today’s debate over Brexit, the NHS, and excluding workers from outside of the UK, labour under colony is treated as an infrastructure to be both deployable and disposable. Eddo-Lodge again:

“The aftermath of yet another world war brought with it fresh labour demands, and Britain once again encouraged immigration. When the SS Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England, it carried 490 Caribbean men and two Caribbean women, all of whom were prepared to muck in with the job of restoring a post-war Britain.20 The Windrush docked at Tilbury in Thurrock, Essex on 22 June 1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects.”

The subsequent fate of the “Windrush Generation”, of hostile environment, of lost documents, of removing of basic conditions for life and work, and so on, is a clear demonstration of how labourers, converted to an infrastructural function in the eyes of colonialists can be removed from any institutional relation, or be isolated by that function from any deep institutional contact in the first place, with little concern given to those Commonwealth subject’s actual status and provision in the UK. Invited when necessary, forgotten and invisible when no longer needed.

Moreover, by framing this history as a moment of ‘infrastructuring’ that reverses the former dynamics of empire, is this narrative a turning inwards of the concept of distance as it was transplanted with the post War migration from Caribbean and African into the popular national(its) imaginary and structures? As a reversal of previous imaginaries — the invisible infrastructural work of each lodging, employment, healthcare and citizenship refusal, each racist newspaper article and political speech white Britain took upon itself — distance is infrastructured into the proximity of a shared island. This invisible work that is required to hold an infrastructural world together facilitates a direct transposition of colonial logics of separation, displacement and disposability into the fabric of Britain so that migration would not to unseat white supremacy within British nationalism. That is to say, the infrastructural imaginary entangling distance and proximity was part of the creation of another layer of infrastructural difference or segregation in housing, in employment, in health care, in cultural and social participation and access, which still persists today — precisely despite alleged parity given by commonwealth status.

This is in and of itself and important infrastructural story.

It is also potentially supportive when looking at the way in which the digitisation, networking and computational modelling of infrastructure enables a mass expansion of what can be considered as infrastructure and treated as such. That is, once the idea of digital infrastructure — which acts and can be treated like virtual code, but also incorporates physical assets / objects / operations — allows pretty much anything to be modelled, organised, and operated like an infrastructure (see: Kief Morris on Infrastructure as Code, 2018; or Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, on Media Infrastructure, 2015; NIC, “Data for the public good,” 2017), these elements now treated as an infrastructural asset can also become both deployable and disposable. The work of Lisa Nakamura, Ramon Amaro, Aria Dean, and Sara Ahmed would be key here to showing how race is both a model and a focus of this disposability.