Special isssue

This book is not a typical academic study, although it is written by an academic. Dominic Davies, a literary scholar with postcolonial interests, has put together an engaged and personal work in cultural politics, exploring how a rhetoric of infrastructure has been deployed by capitalists and government operatives in various contexts of modernity since the eighteenth century. Davies focuses on the subregion of the English Midlands where he grew up, and to which he repeatedly returns during the book. In the process, he offers numerous comparisons which function as different means of understanding that region in global contexts of power and the enforcement of inequality. While the place context of the Potteries area surrounding Stoke-on-Trent, in the northern Midlands, is a central setting for Davies, the book’s mobility tracks that of the British Empire, taking in for instance the campaign that culminated in a statue’s removal at the University of Cape Town in South Africa on 9 April 2015 (119–22).