Imre Szeman

Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do specific energy sources make to human values and politics? What concepts and theories allow us to clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? And how have changing energy resources transformed culture in turn? Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics collects conceptual interventions, illuminating short narratives and adventurous think-pieces from major scholars to generate new ways of thinking about energy. Rather than offering a catalog of existing knowledge, the keywords collected in Fueling Culture push past the limits of current discourse, much of which focuses on the irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.

Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from political economy, political ecology, environmental history, eco-criticism, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new, including thing theory and actor network theory. Since the significant social, political and cultural predicaments generated by energy are moving to the forefront of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the aim of this book is to generate novel insights into the social circulation of energy and the importance of energy for critical investigations and interpretations of culture today.

Topics include: aboriginal, abundance, addiction, altruism, America, anthropocene, architecture, Arctic, automobile, biopolitics/energopolitics, biological evolution, celluloid, charcoal, China, coal, community, corporation, crisis, dams, demand, disaster, ecology, electricity, engine, Enlightenment, ethics, evolution, exhaust, exhaustion, fallout, fracking, frontier, geophilosophy, gender, globalization, green, image, innovation, intellectual history, kerosene, Latin America, materialism, media, mediashock, Middle East, network, Nigeria, off-grid, peak, pipeline, plastics, resilience, resource curse, risk, rubber, rural, Russia, security, soil, solar, spills, strike, suburb, sugar, surveillance, sustainability, Texas, unobtanium, urban ecology, United States, utopia, waste, water, whaling, wood and work.