Jina B. Kim’s Care at the End of the World (Duke, 2025) radicalizes what we think of as infrastructure in an increasingly-precarious contemporary landscape, one defined by racialized abandonment, isolation, and apocalyptic devastations. Infrastructures, in anthropologist Brian Larkin’s words, “are built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space.”1 As a functional means of support, connection, and resource distribution, infrastructures are often conceived in their material forms: bridges, roads, schools, food chains, finance systems, and even prisons.2 By contrast, Kim reimagines these networks in the absence of state support, calling upon “people as infrastructure” to coordinate more informal webs of affective labor, care, and life-world maintenance (6).
Yet people’s reparative capacities, Kim boldly argues, are inextricably linked to infrastructure’s instrumentalization by the US welfare state. Delving into “infrastructural narratives” authored by disabled, feminist, and/or queer writers of color across the last three decades, Kim locates a structural affinity between disability politics and the targeted populations of welfare reform, asking, “Who is supported by infrastructure? Who is disabled by it?” (4-6) Within the national imaginary, Kim observes that such inquiries are often met by myths of racialized pathology and their underlying eugenic logics: the labor of care work, after all, is disproportionately performed by women and people of color (6). In turn, Care at the End of the World seeks out coalitional opportunities, or what Kim calls “support imaginaries”—between intellectual fields, across uneven distributions of precarity, and beyond representational means—which place care-work at the forefront of their liberatory blueprints (12).
In pursuing this vision, Kim devises a reading method of “cripping” infrastructure, in which able-bodied assumptions become impediments to bridging solidarity across categories of difference. By presenting this method alongside feminist-of-color writings from the 1980s, such as Audre Lorde’s “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,”and Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Kim persuasively demonstrates how a radical disability ethos has always been central to resisting the interlocking matrices of white supremacy, heteropatriarchal familial norms, and class stratification (10). In turning to these writers, Kim recuperates “dependency” from the national imaginary and its mythological attachment to the racialized figures of the welfare queen, the undocumented and/or noncitizen immigrant, and the disabled nonworker. This is the “crip-of-color” critique which Kim’s subtitle references: an epistemological project of interdependency which revolves around the ethical cultivation of bodily limits and vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure, as Kim’s subtitle also suggests, need not manifest itself literally. Care at the End of the World assembles an oeuvre of “infrastructural narratives” that attenuate the built, physical facets of infrastructure towards more radical visions of care for those most targeted by state divestment (14). On one hand, Kim acknowledges that infrastructures almost always function in order to brutalize and eviscerate racialized populations: the carceral system, for example, which exists (following her citations of scholars like Liat Ben-Moshe and Ruth Gilmore) to provide the state free labor under the pretense of “protection.”3 Yet on the other hand, Kim argues that our collective attachments to infrastructure, when mediated by an “awareness of our enmeshment, in a webbed systemic infinity,” can avow deeply radical possibilities. (117). She approaches crip-of-color authored novels, poems, and stories as vital spaces of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls “freedom dreaming,” in which the disability justice principle of interdependency structures “a way out of the world that currently exists” (24). Following the Introduction, a shift from infrastructural violence to the aesthetics of interdependency determines the contents of the book’s four chapters, which offer in-depth readings of the following texts: Sapphire’s Push (1996), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Samuel R. Delaney’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Tonguebreaker (2019) and Aurora Levins Morales’s Kindling: Writings on the Body (2013).
The black maternal figure of the welfare queen is an important touchstone for Kim, as it provides Care at the End of the World an intersectional contour around which to approach the nation’s infrastructural violence as deeply anti-black, anti-femme, and ableist. In the first half of the book, Kim “crips” the welfare queen by way of Sapphire’s Push and Ward’s Salvage the Bones, thus inaugurating her initial intervention into state-authored myths of “resource parasitism,” a so-called “wasteful” form of dependency that is further explored in Samuel Delaney’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders through a politics of non-reproductive labor. Taken together, these novels register what Kim calls the “dis/enabling effects of infrastructure” across the domestic arenas of welfare reform. In Kim’s lucid reading of Salvage the Bones, for example, the failure of rural health systems goes hand-in-hand with hurricane Katrina’s uneven, destructive impact on poor black households. Yet this intersection also presents characters an opportunity to “mother a vision of survival” steeped in a mythical, interspecies interdependency, “where the most vulnerable survive” (45). This is akin to the crip-of-color embrace of Kelley’s “freedom dreaming,” which makes sense of the future through the unexpected longings, pleasures, and joys brought on by crip-of-color care-work.
The strategies by which these texts counter the austerity logics of welfare reform and their normative cultural ideologies include eroticizing waste-management (Through the Valley), casting spells for disabled femme futures (Tonguebreaker),steeping inside collective anger and frustration (Kindling), and mapping out hyperempathetic landscapes of pedestrian migration (Parable). All these techniques disturb fantasies of embodied integrity and mobility that have deemed disabled lives unworthy of any kind of care, and in doing so, these creative works expose how our contemporary care crisis manifests itself through the weaponization of difference. Yet they also ritualize and honor the work of crip “dreaming” and desire: if such dreaming depends upon the infrastructural flows of basic resources, it simultaneously calls forth a more expansive understanding of what defines “basic resources” altogether. Within regimes of racialized austerity, the public funding of resource allocation is always devoted towards the flourishing of a global elite (32). Kim’s readings of Butler’s Parable and Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, however,underscores the California freeway as a crip-of-color infrastructure upon which global capitalism’s hypermobile expansion depends. In these texts, resources are the skills, practices, and systems of thought which “enable[s] vulnerable life to flourish,” transforming infrastructure into a storied landscape, or even a soundscape, through which “crip wisdom” is formed (116).
In the final chapter, “Care at the End of the World: Health/Care Infrastructure and Disability Justice Life-Writing,” Kim turns to the poetry of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Aurora Levins Morales, two queer-of-color activists in the contemporary disability justice movement. Exemplary of “disability life writing,” Kindling and Tonguebreaker both transform the state’s willful neglect of disabled life into poems, prayers, rituals, and other performances that frame disability as a sacred form of survival. These works necessitate “a conceptual overhaul” of what care means, and who deserves it—a call-to-action that pushes against interdependency as simply public consciousness-raising (145). While touched upon in other parts of Care at the End of the World, here Kim attends to these crip-of-color writers as activists, as their disabled survival in late-stage capitalism means adopting a stance of unabashed financial need. Kim cites other disability activists in this chapter, such as Alice Wong and Linda Taylor, whose public statements and requests for support operate as “self-made infrastructures” of disabled self-determination (135).
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Care at the End of the World lies in its recognition that women-of-color liberation movements have always been, and always will be, disability justice movements. Kim’s astute readings and citations of Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, reclaim disability from the intersectional afterlives of these writers. More than a spectralized, end-of-life event, Care at the End of the World recognizes disability as lifeworld that must be sustained and tended on a collective scale. To that end, she urges other scholars to take up this work of “cripping” the queer-of-color past, so that the invocation of disabled futures can be envisioned now, through the webs of care-work laid out by ancestral visions. Storied with creation myths, scenes of re-birth and resurrection, and personal reflections, Jina. B. Kim’s book joins the scholarship of M. Jacqui Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Grace Kyungwon Hong in its overpowering articulations of how a liberatory world can, through imaginative praxes, be prefigured into being. For queer-of-color and crip scholars interested in accounts of contemporary literature that take seriously speculative, abolitionist, and insurgent desires, Care at the End of the World will provide a compelling and innovative model for embodying infrastructural thought.
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Endnotes
- Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 42 (October 2013): 329.
- See Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393-419.
- See Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (University of Minnesota Press: 2020); Ruth Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso: 2022).
Augusta Funk