2025 Theses Doctoral

The Infrastructure of Allegory: Figurations of Housing in African Diasporic Literature and Culture

Grand Pre, Tyler Allen

Everywhere you look, walk, turn on a light, or browse the internet, you rely on infrastructure—the roads, the trains, the buildings, but also the buried plumbing, the gas and electric lines, the cable, the sewers, the money.

My project touches on the figural uses of infrastructure to examine the experiential and symbolic legacies of both public and private housing in the US and Caribbean. Infrastructures are only truly visible when they do not work, break down, or people intentionally disrupt them. It is at these moments of breakdown that the questions as to who must fix, update, or implement them in the first place take on deeply symbolic significance—especially for postcolonial, racialized communities across the African diaspora. For example, the promises of urban renewal—whether in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago or the bidonvilles around Fort-de-France, Martinique—have historically accompanied the threats of future disinvestment, urban segregation, and destroyed ecologies.

This dissertation engages housing as a symbolic and experiential nexus of multiple categories of infrastructure. It is a site where the symbolic needs of the community, as well as state recognition, meet the domestic/urban needs of running water, heat, electricity, and access to public transit and paved roads. Housing, I argue, is an expressive medium through which Black writers, artists, and architects have spoken to socio-economic imbalance, structural racism, and neo-colonialism.

I look, for instance, at the novels of Paule Marshall as she wrote across the contexts of Brooklyn Brownstones and the industrialization of a fictional Caribbean island in the 1950s and 60s. Then there is Patrick Chamoiseau’s figuration of the geopolitics of language through the confrontation of urban center and periphery in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in his novel Texaco. In the third chapter, I examine Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s cinematic intervention in the racial allegories surrounding the Chicago Cabrini Green Projects in the Candyman film franchise.