Work in Progress
Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy
- Edited with Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger
Resource depletion and anxiety are not new, nor is the paralyzing knowledge that a particular form of energy is harmful or unsustainable. How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do specific energy sources make to human values and politics ? How have changing energy resources transformed culture?
This collection of scholarly essays, brief reflections, and info blurbs will focus on intersections between energy, history, and a range of cultural formations, including literature, film, art, digital media, and popular culture. We will include essays that touch on a wide range of energy resources (dung, wood/charcoal, coal, tallow, plant oils, whale oil, kerosene, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear, biofuels, solar, wind, wave, steam, and human energy). We also plan to include essays on energy resources like electricity (which circulates as a secondary form of energy generated by wood, coal, etc). We are also curious about dams as projects of decolonization and modernization.
We hope for broad geographic scope in this collection, with attention to place-specific concerns and the spatial relations entailed in different forms of energy use, including what Fernando Coronil has called the “international division of nature.” If the shift from wood to coal allowed for massive increases in energy consumption with less land/woodlots devoted to energy production, as Timothy Mitchell argues, what other shifts in scale are important for thinking about the history of energy formations? As Laurie Shannon argues in a PMLA essay on tallow, the shift from energy produced within the household to modes of energy sourced elsewhere suggests that questions of scale are central for thinking about energy. Ken Hiltner’s argument that pollution increases with the changing spatial concentration of urban London suggests the urgency of contemplating energy in relation to scale in earlier periods. Is it possible that all forms of energy are “dirty” when scaled up to meet demand?
The question of periodization is crucial to this project. How do we periodize cultural production around material resources that have been unread or elided by critics? How do questions of energy become legible in moments of crisis? What is the role of energy scarcity and profligacy? The role of an “energy unconscious” delieates one mode of analysis, as does the simultaneity of different modes of energy resources. Thus periodization is not a simple matter. Consider Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attention to the coincidence of the age of Enlightenment and the Anthropocene, Mitchell’s comparison of wood, coal, oil and the forms of social and political organization they entail, and Michael Pollan’s account of the shift from the sun and fossil fuels in the industrialization of food.
In addition to periodization, we’re interested in essays that explore methodology: protocols of reading that are attuned to questions of energy (or its absence) within a given text. How do we read for energy in relation to the sociology and materiality of literary production and distribution? How do we identify cultural forms that are particularly attuned to these questions? How does energy put pressure on literary and cultural forms? Does genre look different when we think about energy?
We hope to gather writing that is multiply interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from political economy, political ecology, environmental history, eco-criticism, postcolonial and globalization studies, materialisms old and new, including thing theory and actor network theory.
On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil
- In progress
One of the unintended outcomes of the second Gulf War has been an ever-expanding public recognition of the limits of the global hydrocarbon economy. Oil, natural gas, and other hydrocarbons are resources that play an essential role in capitalist economies; as is well-known, these resources are also finite, a fact that has been thrown into stark relief by the current triangulation of military adventurism, the demands of rapidly expanding developing economies, and the hard cold facts of global warming and ecological catastrophe.
The reality of oil—its physical substance, its environmental impact, its monetary value—has made it seem a topic better addressed by geologists, environmental scientists and economists than cultural critics and theorists. But far from being a mere complement to these sciences of oil, it is only through an investigation of the complex cultural politics surrounding this substance that it is possible to produce a full understanding of the problem and challenge this resource represents. Oil is not just one source of energy amongst others, to be replaced in due course by more ecological friendly ones. Rather, oil is history, a source of cheap energy without which the past century and a half would have been utterly different. And oil is ontology, the structuring “Real” of our contemporary socio-political imaginary, and perhaps for this reason, just as inaccessible as any noumenon in the flow of everyday experience from the smoggy blur of sunrise to sundown. Oil is a substance that has given shape to capitalist socialist reality, perhaps as much as the division of labour or the dance of reification. Exploring the cultural narratives and discourses through which we explain (or, as the case may be, fail to explain) the place of oil in our lives allows us to grasp its essential social and cultural substance, and what our futures might look like in its absence.
On Empty examines the cultural politics of oil at various sites and through a range of political, cultural and theoretical narratives.