Displacing the Dead: Infrastructural Cemetery Removal and the Careful Media of Undertaking

After its founding in 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) began constructing hydroelectric dams throughout the Southeastern United States in an effort to supply government-subsidized energy to the public. However, many infrastructural sites needed to be artificially flooded to accommodate the terraformations of damming. But the TVA was not just tasked with evacuating the living; they were also responsible for disinterring thousands of cemeteries. In my examination of the media archive left in the wake of the TVA's cemetery relocations, I theorize infrastructure as an undertaker whose media are fundamentally implicated in the careful, intimate, and ultimately extractive processes of death.