Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature, and Culture

In this Introduction, the collection’s editors offer critical readings of Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel, The City Always Wins (2017), alongside a number of other literary texts, to open up and explicate the book’s orienting concept of ‘Planned Violence’. It situates the book in recent interdisciplinary work on infrastructures as both physical and aesthetic objects, and in commentaries on the relationship between the spatial layouts of post/colonial cities and the different kinds of violence to which they give rise. Throughout it further emphasizes the resistant quality of literary and cultural production as a way to diagnose and counter the planned violence of urban infrastructures in the post/colonial city, which is one of the collection’s overarching efforts. It concludes with a summary overview of the book’s three sections, highlighting the relationships between the chapters and creative interludes that follow