Nicole Rizzuto Awarded MLA Prize for Edited Collection

A cover The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure, whose main image is of the illuminated Guangzhou Stadium.

The department is excited to announce that Nicole Rizzuto’s co-edited collection with Kelly Mee Rich and Susan Zieger, entitled The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern UP, 2022), has been awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection. The prize jury commended the collection this way:

“Infrastructure, like the body, is a relation rather than an entity. The Aesthetic Life of
Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment charts new paths for, and decolonizes, both
literary and infrastructure studies by proposing a poetics of infrastructure as a set of
temporally unstable forms. Kelly M. Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger have
brought together essays that masterfully demonstrate how these forms govern embodied
experiences and produce ambient conditions of life in a range of genres. Racial
capitalism, sexual labor, and the plantation system inform imperial infrastructures, and
the shadow histories excavated by the lens of infrastructural aesthetics counter the
assumed oppositions rooted in the traditional privileging of infrastructure’s technicity:
nature versus built environments or humans versus objects. This volume illuminates
multiple fields by attending to infrastructure’s figural, material, and situated dimensions.”