This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.’s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes.
AnandNGuptaAAppelH (2018) The Promise of Infrastructure.
Durham:
Duke University Press.
2.
AndersenT (2004) Los Angeles Plays Itself.
USA:
Thom Andersen Productions.
3.
AngevineR (2004) The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America.
Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
4.
BardR (1972) Settlement pattern of the eastern Mojave Desert. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
5.
BarryA (2013) Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline.
Oxford:
Wiley.
6.
BashkowI (2014)
What kind of a person is the corporation afterword. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37 (2): 296–307.
7.
BearL (2007) Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self.
New York:
Columbia University Press.
8.
BLM’s Analysis Examining Whether Certain Components of the Cadiz Project Further a Railroad Purpose (2020) Sacramento, CA: Bureau of Land Management. Available at: www.cadizinc.com/downloads/2020_Cadiz_letter_and_analysis.pdf (accessed 10 February 2020).
BradleyLD (1909) Before the Trojan Horse is admitted, The Puzzled Citizen will have to be shown a little more fully (Cartoon). Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 3 February, From Library of Congress. s Available at: https://lccn.loc.gov/2009616338 (accessed 4 June 2021).
11.
Cadiz Southeastern Railway (n.d.) Welcome. Available at: www.desertsteamtrain.com/ (accessed 7 January 2020).
12.
CarraherC (1998) Dump in the Desert: A Scrapbook of the Bolo Dump Fight.
California:
Joshua Tree.
13.
CarseA (2014) Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal.
Cambridge:
MIT Press.
14.
CarseA (2016) Keyword: Infrastructure. In: HarveyPJensenCBMoritaA (eds)Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion.
UK:
Taylor & Francis, pp.27–39.
15.
CarseAKneasD (2019)
Unbuilt and unfinished: The temporalities of infrastructure. Environment and Society10(1): 9–28.
16.
CarterDAckerA (2020)
To Oblivion and beyond: Imagining infrastructure after collapse. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space38(6): 1084–1100.
17.
ChangGH (2019) Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad.
Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
18.
CliffordFPerryT (2000) Desert water entrepreneur closely tied to governor. Los Angeles Times, 16 April, 1.
19.
ComaroffJComaroffJ (2002)
Alien-nation: Zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism. The South Atlantic Quarterly101(4): 779–805.
20.
CooperF (2010)
Writing the history of development. Journal of Modern European History8(1): 5–23.
21.
DeSilveyCEdensorT (2013)
Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography37(4): 465–485.
22.
DeverellW (1994) Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910.
Berkeley:
University of California Press.
23.
DroverCE (1985)
Navajo settlement and architecture in Southeastern California. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology7(1): 46–57.
24.
ErieSPBrackmanHD (2006) Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California.
USA:
Stanford University Press.
25.
FicekRE (2018)
Infrastructure and colonial difference in Puerto Rico after hurricane María. Transforming Anthropology26(2): 102–117.
26.
FreemanMJ (1999) Railways and the Victorian Imagination.
New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
27.
GeorgeH (1868)
What will the railroad bring us. The Overland Monthly1(4): 297–306.
28.
GibsonKDHorvathRJ (1983)
Aspects of a theory of transition within the capitalist mode of production. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space1(2): 121–138.
29.
Gibson-GrahamJK (1996) The End of Capitalism (as we Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy.
Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers.
30.
GoldsmithAL (1967)
Charles and Frank Norris. Western American Literature2(1): 30–49.
31.
GramsciA (1992) Prison Notebooks (Trans. J Buttigieg). New York: Columbia University Press.
32.
HarveyPKnoxH (2015) Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise.
Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
33.
HeadrickDR (1988) The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
34.
HugoV (2002) The Toilers of the Sea (Trans. J Hogarth). New York: Penguin.
35.
HundleyN (2001) The Great Thirst: Californians and Water – A History. Rev. ed.Berkeley:
University of California Press.
36.
HurstonZN (1938) Tell my Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.
New York:
Perennial Library.
37.
JamesGW (1906) The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Southern California).
Boston:
Little, Brown, and Company.
38.
JohnsonH (1976) Order Upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country.
New York:
Oxford University Press.
39.
KarukaM (2019) Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad.
Oakland, CA:
University of California Press.
KirschS (2005) Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving.
New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
43.
KlaskyP (1997) An Extreme and Solemn Relationship: Native American Perspectives on the Proposed Ward Valley Radioactive Waste Dump.
USA:
San Francisco State University.
44.
KuletzV (1998) The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West.
UK:
Psychology Press.
45.
LarkinB (2013)
The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology42(1): 327–343.
46.
LauroSJ (2017) Introduction: Wander and wonder in Zombieland. In: SJ Lauro (ed) Zombie Theory: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.vii–xxiii.
47.
LazonickWO’SullivanM (2000)
Maximizing shareholder value: A new ideology for corporate governance. Economy and Society29(1): 13–35.
48.
LeeH (1875) The Octopus: Or, the ‘Devil-Fish’ of Fiction and of Fact.
London:
Chapman and Hall.
49.
LepselterS (2016) The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny.
Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
50.
LothropGR (1993)
The boom of the ’80s revisited. Southern California Quarterly75(3/4): 263–301.
51.
MacDougallR (2006)
The wire devils: Pulp thrillers, the telephone, and action at a distance in the wiring of a nation. American Quarterly58(3): 715–741.
52.
MarxK (1867) Capital, A Critique of Political Economy (Trans. B Fowkes). New York: Penguin.
53.
MorettiF (2005) Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms.
New York:
Verso (Radical thinkers, 7).
54.
MyrickD (1963) Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California.
Berkeley, CA:
Howell-North Books.
SchlosserK (2017)
Critical geosophies: A pyschotopological reading of Rice’s vampires and Romero’s zombies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space35(3): 533–549.
63.
StarrK (1986) Introduction. In: NorrisF (ed.) The Octopus.
New York:
Penguin, pp.vii–xxxi.
64.
StevensonR (2018)
“Vision isolated in eternity”: Nostalgia catches the train. Humanities7(4): 95.
65.
StolerA (2008)
Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination. Cultural Anthropology23(2): 191–219.
66.
StranglemanT (2002)
Constructing the past: Railway history from below or a study in nostalgia?The Journal of Transport History23(2): 147–158.
67.
SuttonI (1967)
Private property in land among reservation Indians in Southern California. Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers29: 69–89.
68.
ThayerKL (2015)
The 1875 general railway Right of Way Act and Marvin M. Brandt revocable trust v. United States: Is this the end of the line?The University of the Pacific Law Review47: 75–104.
69.
TrafzerC (2015) A Chemehuevi Song: The Resilience of a Southern Paiute Tribe.
USA:
University of Washington Press.
70.
VoylesT (2015) Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country.
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
WalentaJ (2015)
Corporate personhood and the corporate body: The case of former energy giant Enron on trial for fraud. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space33(3): 545–559.
73.
WatersLL (1950) Steel Trails to Santa Fe.
Lawrence, KS:
University of Kansas Press.
74.
WhiteR (2011) Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. 1st ed.New York:
W.W. Norton.
75.
WilsonJBayónM (2017)
Fantastical materializations: Interoceanic infrastructures in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space35(5): 836–854.
76.
WolmarC (2012) The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America.
New York:
PublicAffairs.
