Sultana Dreams of Infrastructure

This article examines Rokeya Hossain's “Sultana's Dream” (1905), a short story that pictures a solar-powered utopia governed by women, as a key site for thinking through the entanglements of sovereignty, gender, colonization, and environmental relations as they are articulated through infrastructure. To read infrastructurally in this way, we attend to socio-historical contexts of nineteenth-century Bengali society and to the Victorian imperial roots of early solar inventions, alongside the more modular aesthetics and meaning-making affordances of solar energy. Such a mode of reading makes infrastructure legible as an essential political ground for the maintenance or transformation of socio-ecological relations and reveals the irreducible political, material, and poetic qualities of infrastructures themselves. Texts like “Sultana's Dream” make such configurations visible and open to interrogation, and demonstrate the ways that solar, as infrastructure, energizes new social and political forms—even those yet undreamed

Geography · Islamic Studies and History