"The Material Lives of Logistics" - As part of a panel proposal for the upcoming American Literature Association (ALA) Conference (Chicago, IL - May 23-26, 2024), we invite paper abstracts that explore logistics and infrastructures in literary texts. The global supply chain accounts for the movement of 90% of everything and over 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions (George 2013, MIT Climate Portal). The organizational imperatives enabling the ecocidal acceleration of commodity circulation, Alberto Toscano reminds us, encompass “a deeply incoherent, contradictory, conflicted and competitive domain” (2014). Literary forms are particularly apt for dealing with contradiction and incoherence. The proposed panel turns to literature to draw out the “irrational rationalities” and violent logics of the banal business science of supply chains—and the infrastructures and fossil economies that enable them.

This panel seeks papers which explore how literary texts illuminate the material flows and infrastructures of logistics, the organizational logic enabling global commodity chains. Presentations may consider: in what ways can literary forms represent logistical imperatives, circulationist drives, and infrastructural imaginaries? How might literary and aesthetic forms expose the fault-lines and contradictions in the continent-crossing scale and ubiquity of global commodity circuits? How might literary and aesthetic forms inventory the implicitly violent logics of logistical-ordering, tracking, containment, and waste-elimination? And in what ways can literary and aesthetic forms work towards mapping the vast terrain of fossil-fueled supply chains, their obsessive drive towards efficiency— and its ecological and human “cost”?

Please send presentation titles and abstracts (300 words) to Tierney S. Powell at tpowel20@uic.edu by January 24, 2024. Please also include a 2-3 sentence bio-note and A/V needs. -- The 35th Annual American Literature Association Conference will be held at The Palmer House Hilton (17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, IL 60603) from May 23-26, 2024.