How to Blow Up a Novel: Pipeline Insurgency and Narrative Form in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

With this article, I explore the insurgent aesthetic embedded in Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria. Building upon recent scholarship on forms, infrastructuralism, Indigenous aesthetics, and grounded normativity, I demonstrate how contemporary fiction can expose the contradictions inherent to infrastructure and reveal the inseparability of material and narrative forms. While thematically concerned with the destruction of fossil-capitalist infrastructure and the repurposing of wreckage, Wright also adapts the literary forms of the settler state and reconstitutes them into an anti-colonial Waanyi epic infused with ethics of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental defense. In doing so, she models a capacious narrative form capable of holding together heterogenous accounts of Land attentive to the relations of humans, animals, spirits, and claypans in the Gulf country. In an ecocritical contribution to literary and infrastructural studies, I propose an expansive understanding of form that includes not only aesthetic and sociopolitical arrangements, but nonhuman lifeways, migrations, and interdependencies, too: in other words, ecological infrastructures.