Slow Disturbance

Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier

Rafico Ruiz

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781478008507
  9781478007982
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478012139
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction. First Fish, Then Mediation
• The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 1959
• Chapter 1. The Plant
• Chapter 2. Credit and Common Sense
• The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 2011
• Chapter 3. Meta Incognita
• Chapter 4. The Promise of Extraction
• The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 1997
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index