Terminal Culture: Literature, Television, and Film Amidst Supply Chain Capitalism

Terminal Culture: Literature, Television, and Film Amidst Supply Chain Capitalism argues that literature, television, and film produce powerful narratives that theorize and imagine alternatives to logistics, the spatial practice and organizational logic undergirding expansive and intensifying global commodity chains and the fossil economies that fuel them. Through formal and materialist analysis of works including HBO’s The Wire and Station Eleven, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer and Why Cybraceros, I theorize how aesthetic representations of logistical crises—bottlenecks, blockades, viral mutations, and environmental catastrophes—expose the dehumanizing and ecocidal logics of accelerating, energy-intensive capitalist circulation. While freight transport sectors account for 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and constitute a network that is almost sublime in its scale and ubiquity, literature, film, and television offer prisms for bringing proliferating petrocapitalist circulation into common understanding. Further, I argue that these works imagine what I call “counter-logistics,” which names a set of formal and thematic tactics used by cultural production to denaturalize logistical fantasies, socio-spatial practices, and organizational systemic operations and to open up the potential to imagine new forms of social, infrastructural, and logistical organization. The counterlogistical prospect of Terminal Culture invests in the belief that infrastructures, organizational systems, and a certain choreography of resources, materials, and labor at scale(s) can be collectively held, non-exploitative, and the basis of human flourishing. Amidst the overlapping crises of the present, from within the terminal present, I contend that literature, television, and film—and the cognitive work they impel and necessitate—might help stir us from the logistical nightmare, seize the means of logistical organization, and work towards counterlogistical flourishing.