ABSTRACT
Streets and highways are the background to people’s lives; they are built environments, entangled in long histories of settler colonial and racialized violence; they facilitate the flow of capital; and they can be the meeting points and materials of revolt. Just as these infrastructures are key nodes through which struggles over social organization occur, so too are they central to the formal, political, and aesthetic stakes of contemporary literature. This chapter surveys three critical frameworks (experiential, infrastructural, and logistical) that address the question of how and why streets and highways matter to literature and proposes we read these approaches as instances of what Henri Lefebvre has termed “levels” that must be apprehended together to complete the work of literary and social criticism. The chapter concludes with a reading of Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng’s Mercenary English and argues that Eng’s poetry not only illustrates what’s at stake in paying critical attention to the streets and highways that compose and appear in literary texts but also demands that such an engagement be carried out across these levels.
