Energy Humanities

Course Description:
What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of energy? That is, what if we approached William Wordsworth’s Romantic ruminations on the “sublime” crafts of “men’s arts” as a praxis for thinking about the material forces of the sublime—“motion and means...on land and sea” made possible first by the winds that would move commerce across the Atlantic Ocean in the long sixteenth century and soon thereafter by coal? What if we understood colonial occupation in the context of East Africa or throughout Latin America in terms of the transnational plantation economies that would also be fueled by wind or hydropower or coal, and thus conducted postcolonial critiques of novels like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Autumn of the Patriarch or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat accordingly? Might we then understand energy not merely in terms of the “fuel-injected” American dream featured in a Bruce Springsteen song, but instead as the very means of fueling culture? Might we then appreciate that the conventional tropes of literary expression and critique are the products of the material forces contemporary to each work? That petroleum, for example, isn’t simply a theme, but is that which enables the very production of culture?

As a seminar on Petrocultures, and an introduction to the Energy Humanities, this course shall focus on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture.  We shall explore a wide archive of cultural works that represent, in the words of literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, the “ages of wood…coal…oil” and ultimately alternative fuel sources like wind and solar power. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Nawal El Saadawi. ,Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Herman Melville, and many others will guide us through our new geological epoch—call it the Anthropocene or the Thermocene—illustrating the intersections of cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression.

As we also will come to learn, there is no “age of wood,” for example, without a correlative commitment to Enlightenment notions of “improvement,” whether of self or land. There is likewise no age of oil, nor of wind, without a persistent commitment to such notions of civilizational progress as we see in the paeans to industry and “enlightenment” that generally characterize popular political thought. Thus, while we end with an exploration of alternative energy—alternatives, that is, to fossilized carbon—we likewise question whether a simple shift in fuel is sufficient to the task of averting the sorts of apocalyptic scenarios presented in novels like Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Ultimately, we will follow the After Oil collective in asking how aesthetic forms represent (and often reinforce) energy regimes and how, in the face of an overwhelming commitment to disaster porn, we might “frame the unimaginable,” which is to say life after carbon.

Moderne Menschen kleiden sich in Öl, via Kunstdünger ernähren sie
sich mithilfe von Öl. Sie bewegen sich fort mit Öl und zahlen mit Öl. Vor
allem aber verbrennen sie Öl: Milliarden von Verbrennungsprozessen finden
heute zu jedem Zeitpunkt statt, in Motoren rund um die Welt. Selbst
die digitale Technik, die gerne als das schlechthin Andere, Neue, nahezu
Körperlose gehandelt wird, das die rohen und dreckigen Verbrennungstechnologien des Industriezeitalters abzulösen beginnt, befindet sich in einem intimen Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zu den Technologien der Petromoderne. Diese Zusammenhänge sind wissenschaftlich so unstrittig wie gut dokumentiert. Die energy humanities gehen allerdings einen Schritt darüber hinaus. Sie versuchen, nicht nur die materielle Basis moderner Wirtschaft, Technik, Politik und Konsum, sondern gleichermaßen Werte und Überzeugungen, Ideologien und politische Systeme von den Potentialen fossiler Energieträger her zu denken. Dabei geht es nicht um einen neuen Technikdeterminismus, wohl aber um die Erkenntnis, dass sich typisch moderne Konstellationen, dass sich Politik, Ökonomie, Kultur, aber auch die Selbstbilder von Menschen im Wechselverhältnis und unter dem Einfluss neuer, auf fossilen Energieträgern basierender Technologien verändert haben.

Designed to preserve and promote western heritage and culture, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede has become entwined with, and politically and economically expedient for, Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Performances at the Stampede relieve guilt about the expropriation of Indigenous territory and conquest of the natural world, and produce an affective climate of “crude optimism,” an optimistic attachment to fossil fuel production and consumption despite the brutal realities of extractivism.

Governing oil has been key to the emergence of particular sociotechnical realities throughout the last century and a half. A time-span of the modern/colonial which has been conceptualised by competing social science discourses as 'capitalism' and 'democracy'. A hydrocarbon centred era throughout which the political substance of oil in the form of fuel and energy, as infrastructure or as commodity has shaped the ecology of our politics. An epoch of 'petrocapitalism' and 'carbon democracy' we may refer to as 'oil modernity'. Recently, 'oil assemblages' have emerged in the capitalist periphery that have challenged the political economy of oil modernity. Thus, a particular category of oil politics has been made possible through the novel practices, technopolitics, expertise and governing oil at play in these sites. Such a 'critical oil politics' will be of greater significance within the epoch of transitions the contemporary world has now entered and as we begin to address the breaching of ecological frontiers.

The research project offers an analysis of contemporary instances of critical oil politics taken from Latin America and the Caribbean. The research focuses primarily on two oil assemblages and the forms of 'political oil' they put forward. It takes as its cases Venezuela's Petrocaribe - an oil and energy cooperation program established by the Bolivarian revolutionary government in 2005 - and its form of 'socialist oil', together with Ecuador's oil-based and environmentally informed Yasuni-ITT Initiative (2007-2013) and its promise of an 'oil that stays in the ground', an 'ecological oil'. Both Petrocaribe and the Yasuni-ITT Initiative put forward novel understandings of economy and particular oil objects that go beyond the oil commodity as they shaped Latin America's left turn. The research details both left turn oil assemblages in order to approach the forms of political oil they develop while seeking to comprehend their possibilities and limitations as critical oil politics. To do this the project focuses on particular practices and knowledges linked to the forms of political oil, which may be seen as constituting a novel governing of oil.

The project engages with postcolonial and assemblage approaches to politics and economy, but also builds on Latin American texts on oil. These approaches stand in tension with mainstream Anglophone political science approaches to the politics of oil, international relations and political economy. The project is in dialogue with and contributes to research within the social sciences seeking to incorporate and underscore the role of practices, materiality, and human/nonhuman relations into the study of politics, development, and international political economy.

By means of a close reading of Waubgeshig Rice’s novel "Moon of the Crusted Snow" (2018), this article explores how the energopolitics of settler colonialism, in the wake of fossil fuel extraction and the implementation of its concurrent infrastructures, violently disrupts Indigenous communities and forces them into experiencing petromelancholia—a subconscious life-depending need for fossil fuels. In doing so, the article aims to highlight the West’s inertia regarding their dependency on (infra)structures and the affordances that come with petrocapitalism, how such a framework is by no means a universal given, and how petromelancholia becomes a symptom of settler-colonial energopolitical violence.

How we must rethink what infrastructure is to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. We need to grasp infrastructure as potential or stored energy systems. But we must also avoid embracing the revolutionary models of the 19th and 20th century that were focused on building massive energy-intensive industrial machines. Instead, we need to practice becoming revolutionary infrastructure ourselves, committing ourselves to an ethics of hyposubjective rebecoming.

"We are Petroleum". Tabula Rasa [online]. 2017, n.26, pp.101-122. ISSN 1794-2489.  http://dx.doi.org/10.25058/20112742.190.

"We are Petroleum" is a practices-as-research participatory performance experiment created to research how North Americans conceptualize their relationships with petroleum. During the performance, participants read aloud emulations of Gwich'in diplomatic testimony about being caribou people. In the emulations, the text is the same except the word "caribou" has been replaced with "petroleum." The Gwich'in are an indigenous people whose homelands are in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. For decades, they have been preventing oil and gas development in the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd. The herd sustains them and their identity. This paper examines the original Gwich'in testimony and the performance emulating their testimony to cast petroleum human relations in terms of caribou-Gwich'in relations. The paper and performance use indigenous theories of law and ecological figuration to provoke considering petroleum relations as substantive kinship, structuring legal order, and a cosmology.

Keywords : indigenous jurisprudence; petroleum cosmology; Gwich'in; caribou people; performance emulation; performance practice-as-research.

PLEASE SUPPORT THE JOURNAL: published version available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.1.3.014. This essay offers a discussion of the goals, key questions, and outcomes of my undergraduate course, "Literature and Oil," with particular attention to the "Oil Inventory," a writing assignment I devised (borrowing from Edward Said's citation of Antonio Gramsci) to ask students to trace the presence and absence of oil in their lives.

From 1880 to 1882, two impresarios toured the decaying
body of a dead whale throughout the United States as sideshow exhibition called the “Prince of Whales.” The dead whale show lay at the
intersection of two important vectors in environmental humanities
research: oceans and energy. This essay explores some of the epistemological and ontological problems posed by the whale show, demonstrating that methods and theories drawn from the history of the
senses, media studies, and infrastructure studies can enrich the environmental humanities by offering new approaches to materiality and
putrefaction.

This is an unpublished paper presented at MLA in 2018. My take on Ghosh's intervention takes as its point of departure the similar claims Ghosh makes in The Great Derangement and his seminal 1992 essay on "Petrofiction," where he observed that, despite the centrality of petroleum to modern, and particularly American, life, there was a marked dearth of "oil novels." The burgeoning study of petrocultures has complicated, if not falsified, the earlier claim — even as that study has been in large part inspired by it. My concern in this paper is to consider the claims that Ghosh makes for fiction, for history, and for politics in the Anthropocene, and to assess whether they have an analogous capacity to seed productive discussion. Briefly, I think he's on steadier ground with regard to history and politics than to fiction. My thesis is that he misrecognizes the relationship between literary fiction and the derangements at work on the Earth system; his concern with probability and risk, however, is worth pondering further. And I will reflect on whether positing the earth as responding to human actions in ways that a human might respond is a promising way of thinking about the Anthropocene. I tend to think not.

Jeff Diamanti describes the destructive relationship between climate and capital through the exponential growth of the petroleum industry over the last 40 years. Building on key insights in the environmental and energy humanities, Diamanti introduces the concept of the 'terminal landscape' as a site of storage, transformation and transition, essential to critical ecology in the 21st century.

Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum presents these scenes of transformation as sites through which post-industrial capitalism distributes fossil fuels into the world. Diamanti uses this concept to redefine the post-industrial landscape by revealing the global flows of exchange and storage that precede the distribution of fossil fuels into the world as social form. Advancing a new media theory of energy, fossil fuels and other finite resources become new types of distributable media. Through this line of thinking, the book makes solid connections between media technologies and energy cultures that help to shape a radical critique of the current energy infrastructure that characterises global capitalism.

Arguing that this infrastructure rests on millennia of compact matter, centuries of colonial violence, and decades of technological development, Diamanti's analysis deepens our understanding of the environment as a 'terminal landscape' through case studies of oil companies, countries, artworks, and historical events. Using his under-examined typology of global energy further theorises and politicises the climate crisis for scholars and activists alike.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/climate-and-capital-in-the-age-of-petroleum-9781350191839/

In this era of climate crisis, sustainability is a global imperative. Yet we tend to associate sustainability, nature, and the environment with distant places, science, and policy. The truth is that everything is environmental, from transportation to taxes, work to love, cities to cuisine.

This book is the first to examine contemporary Singapore from an ecocultural lens, looking at the ways that Singaporean life and culture is deeply entangled with the nonhuman lives that flourish all around us. The authors represent a new generation of cultural critics and environmental thinkers, who will inherit the future we are creating today. From chilli crab to Tiger Beer, Changi Airport to Pulau Semakau, O-levels to orang minyak films, these essays offer fresh perspectives on familiar subjects, prompting us to recognise the incredible urgency of climate change and the need to transform our ways of thinking, acting, learning, living, and governing so as to maintain a stable planet and a decent future.

2018 Early draft of chapter to appear in the forthcoming collection, Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi.

Feminist critic Sheena Wilson has recently called for a lens of “critical petro-intersectionality” through which to “expose how the inequities of race, class and gender are not only perpetuated in our current petroculture but also actively deployed as rhetorical strategies to literally and figuratively buoy and sustain existing power sources: oil and the neoliberal petro-state” (177). In particular, Wilson has critiqued how mainstream Euro-American media often instrumentalizes rhetorics that invoke women’s rights in order to rationalize colonial extraction politics and which position female bodies as sites of spectacularized petro-politics, while marginalizing the agency of women in acts of petro-resistance (177). This essay will seek to extend this approach to the gendering of world oil literature by examining two examples of feminist petrofiction from frontiers of oil extraction, Nawal El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom, set in a petro-state resembling Saudi Arabia, and Laura Restrepo’s The Dark Bride, set in Colombia. I argue that in these texts questions of gender, petro-sexuality and the relation between energy and women’s work in the realm of social reproduction are explicitly foregrounded in relation to oil imperialism.

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas "fracking" industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call "divisible governance." Divisible governance-enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation-not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is

Thanatophobia (or death anxiety) has long been a concern of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein, for example, held that fear of death was the primary source of all anxiety. In this chapter, I explore thanatophobia as a way of making sense of the unreasonable, indeed maniacal, attachment of the global North to fossil fuels despite mounting signs that the trajectory of fossil civilization will lead to ecological collapse (and widespread death). Building on Stephanie LeMenager's analysis of the affective terrain of petroculture, I argue that high carbon path dependency is evidence of an irrational attachment to the pleasures and luxuries of fossil-fueled modernity, especially in those parts of the world that have benefited the most from them. This attachment involves a deep fear of existential loss-not only of profits but of a whole way of life-were fossil fuels to disappear entirely. Thus, death anxiety helps to explain what I term here "petromania" - the hallucinatory state of the global North that its intense energy use and growthoriented economics can be extended infinitely into the future.

In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.

This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Toxic Immanence: Nuclear Legacies, Futures, and the Place of Twenty-First Century Nuclear Environmental Humanities, edited by Livia Monnet and Peter van Wyck, from McGill-Queen's University Press. The chapter explores generic and ideological contradictions in the post-catastrophist imaginary of the nuclear, using Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 as a paradigmatic example of post-Soviet Russian speculative fiction, and examines the political implications of the transmedial refashioning of Glukovsky’s novel for mass consumption within international video game markets as a post-apocalyptic first person shooter (FPS). I will focus on the concept of the “enduring nuclear,” which indicates on one hand the long, seemingly imperceptible temporalities of radioactive decay and the “slow violence” of nuclear disaster,  but which also alludes to the ways in which the post-catastrophic genre is bound up with a sense of impossible or blocked futurity, resulting in the contradiction that  speculative post-Soviet fictions such as Metro 2033, while post-apocalyptic, seem incapable of imagining a transition to a post-nuclear modernity.  If a central task of energy humanities critics is to ask, “Who gets to imagine energy futures?”  comparative literary topographies are essential to the formulation of a nuclear energy humanities. A world-literary approach to nuclear environmental criticism should uncover not only imaginaries corresponding to British and American nuclear culture and the dominance of the US imperium, but also on the enduring nuclear futures imagined in post-Soviet Russia and other global contexts of nuclear development in the twenty-first century, such as China, India, and Iran. The globalization of the nuclear can be mapped “through the trace of militarized radiation.”  Our capitalist nuclear modernity is above all a global modernity–singular, planetary, and world-historical –in which all forms of earthly life have been altered by the atmospheric effects of nuclear development

This article examines the discourses and practices of climate change adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula. It suggests that climate change adaptation projects in the region are often attempts at reframing water-related challenges that are already present, regardless of the effects of climate change. For instance, the groundwater sources in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be destroyed not necessarily due to the predicted impacts of climate change but because they will soon be completely consumed. In response, the governments in the Arabian Peninsula, especially the UAE, advance a view that I call the “infinity of water,” by relying on technological solutions, particularly desalination. The nonconventional synthetic quality of water, where more can be generated through desalination whenever necessary, allows the actors in the area to envision and embrace its infinity, regardless of existing and impending water scarcity. This article shows how water ceases to be a “natural” entity, but rather emerges as an assemblage of complex technical procedures, social relations, and historical trajectories.

Psychoanalytic interpretation can help us understand the blockages and fantasies hindering the exodus from fossil fuel use that contemporary science tells us is urgently necessary. A reading of Anna Kavan's 1967 science fiction novel Ice reveals an "energy unconscious" at work by which petroleum fuels a violent and masculinist resolution to the alienation and fragmentation experienced by the protagonists. Such interpretations allow us to recognize how culture and subjectivity are shaped by petroleum, opening a space to work towards framing new narratives and values.

The special issue, “Energy Humanities,” gathers experimental and brief accounts of the cultural history of energy in order to figure new research in the emerging fields of Environmental and Energy Humanities. From plastics to oil and literature, pedagogy to pipelines and activism, loving oil to understanding energy infrastructure, this collection offers a snapshot of the various ways one might approach questions of energy in the humanities.

https://www.crcpress.com/Literature-and-the-Anthropocene/Vermeulen/p/book/9781138543744.

The Anthropocene has fundamentally changed the way we think about our relation to nonhuman life and to the planet. This book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a compelling case for literature’s unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It pays attention to literature’s imaginative and narrative resources, and also to its appeal to the emotions and its relation to the material world. As the Anthropocene enjoins us to read the signals the planet is sending and to ponder the traces we leave on the Earth, it is also, this book argues, a literary problem.

Literature and the Anthropocene maps key debates and introduces the often difficult vocabulary for capturing the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in an insightful way. Alternating between accessible discussions of prominent theories and concise readings of major works of Anthropocene literature, the book serves as an indispensable guide to this exciting new subfield for academics and students of literature and the environmental humanities.

In this essay, I work under the premise—to reiterate what we state in our introduction—of an understanding of oil fiction that takes into account the material conditions of its production in the context of extractivist regimes that thrive on the dispossession of the poor and marginalized. Asserting that petro-economies essentially replicate slave economies through overt parallels of borderless labor extrication from the global fringes, I look at how such energy slaves have been rendered visible, albeit through an aesthetics of absurdism, in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s short story “In Mussafah Grew People.” I read Unnikrishnan’s story on pod laborers by using Michael Lowy’s concept of “critical irrealism,” such that the aesthetics of “absurdity” of Unnikrishnan’s vegetized humans is a potent critique of the capitalistic fantasy of an inexhaustible expropriation that thrives on the incessant supply of an exploitable environment and disposable labor and that endorses Andreas Malm’s theory of fossil fuels as “the general lever for surplus value production.” Subsequently, I also invoke Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore’s notion of “cheapness” to read the pod laborers as “a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kind of work—human and animal, botanical and geological—with as little compensation as possible.”

Article in "Paradoxa", republished in "Strange Horizons" @ http://strangehorizons.com/2016/20160215/macdonald-a.shtml
The contribution of culture and cultural critique to the energy dependencies and dilemmas we face has only just begun to be debated. The “Energy Humanities” interrogate how disciplinary outlooks, methodological conventions and theoretical objectives can elicit “the energy unconscious” in cultural productions. In many ways, sf is the genre best placed to advance our understanding not only of present and future energy crises but also the manner in which we (fail to) envisage and conceive energy as a matter for culture. Sf frequently registers such issues as the future of fuel and mobility, resource imperialism, “realistic” modes of sustainability, and alternative modes of living in geographies and economies altered and reformed by the demands of the environmental crisis....There is a general consensus that future fuel and energy technology has to be radically unlike what we have at present, and I argue that even irresponsible and unimaginable visions of energy futures offer a workable platform to question what we envisage as the future of energy forms and systems—and the scale of our present “worldly” and systemic desires.