Building on recent research on infrastructure as infrastructuring practice, this chapter develops an understanding of literature as part of the supply structure necessary for the emergence and persistence of a democratic public sphere. Two aspects are central here: (a) the technologically and affectively determined attachment of readers to texts and their supporting function in the formation of the public sphere; and (b) the significance of genre in this context. Using slave narratives as its example, it shows that the formation of an abolitionist counterpublic in antebellum America was based on literary texts whose capacity to mobilize anti-racist resistance depended essentially on their genre affiliation. It also shows how the authority of these texts was undermined by basic racist assumptions, and how this pattern continues in the revival of the genre in post-Civil Rights America, making its global use in the literary negotiation of human rights violations problematic.