Stacey Balkan | Florida Atlantic University (original) (raw)
Books by Stacey Balkan
Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. Eds. Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022., 2022
Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy,... more Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory.
Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.
Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, 2022
https://wvupressonline.com/node/896 Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indi... more https://wvupressonline.com/node/896
Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. A materialist history of development on the subcontinent, the project considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, each of which critiques violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of England’s premier trading company and its corporate legatees. In foregrounding the intersection(s) between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy; so too, the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch—those which tend to ignore the uneven histories of industrial development across the Global South. Bringing together extant discussions around settler-colonial practices in India with broader questions around settler ideology and environmental injustice, Rogues concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the subcontinent and beyond.
Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, 2021
https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09158-7.html Oil, like other fossil fuels, p... more https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09158-7.html
Oil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities.
Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states. The chapters engage with African, South American, South Asian, Iranian, and transnational petrofictions and cover topics such as the relationship of colonialism to the fossil fuel economy, issues of gender in the Thermocene epoch, and discussions of migration, precarious labor, and the petro-diaspora. This unique exploration includes testimonies of the oil encounter—through memoirs, journals, and interviews—from a diverse geopolitical grid, ranging from the Permian Basin to the Persian Gulf.
By engaging with non-Western literary responses to petroleum in a concentrated, sustained way, this pathbreaking book illuminates the transnational dimensions of the discourse on oil. It will appeal to scholars and students working in literature and science studies, energy humanities, ecocriticism, petrocriticism, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Henry Obi Ajumeze, Rebecca Babcock, Ashley Dawson, Sharae Deckard, Scott DeVries, Kristen Figgins, Amitav Ghosh, Corbin Hiday, Helen Kapstein, Micheal Angelo Rumore, Simon Ryle, Sheena Stief, Imre Szeman, Maya Vinai, and Wendy W. Walters.
Recent Articles & Chapters by Stacey Balkan
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. , 2024
In this essay I examine anti-extractivist climate fictions that model a radical energy politics, ... more In this essay I examine anti-extractivist climate fictions that model a radical energy politics, while also clarifying the central role of the colonial-capitalist transaction at the heart of petromodernity. Centering the twin aims of decarbonization and decolonization, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s 1905 “Sultana’s Dream”—a proto-solarpunk tale set in Victorian India—anticipates such recent fictions as Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s “Listen: A Memoir” in figuring infrastructural possibility and radical hope after the inevitable collapse of fossil capitalism; and each story likewise models a viable energy commons and thus rejects the conventionally dystopian register of much popular climate fiction.
Revue Études Anglaises. Special Issue: “Being Fossil: Energy Humanities 2.0.” Ed. Pablo Mukherjee. , 2021
As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this... more As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this essay I examine three speculative-critical texts that critique fossil capitalism and which demonstrate the ways in which a simple shift in fuel may be insufficient to the task of building a just future. I first read Ursula LeGuin's 1974 novel The Word for World is Forest as a critique of the plantation logic immanent to her fictional "New Tahiti" before turning to Paolo Bacigalupi's 2010 Ship Breaker-set in the blasted landscapes of the southeastern US's petrochemical belt-in order to consider how the dystopian mode may be productive for thinking about energy cultures, but might ultimately trap the reader in an imaginative impasse. I then look to Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe's recent duograph on the wind economies of Mexico's isthmus of Tehuantepec, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019), which poses questions about energopolitics, just futures, and the imbrications of energy, ontology, and power within systems of modern governance, and which I read as a form of speculative anthropology, or (per historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) "philosophical anthropology." The duograph posits the possibility of unsettling what both authors understand as the distorted logic of the Anthropocene age, while examining putative alternatives to petroculture that merely reinforce systemic forms of social and environmental injustice on a global scale. I read each text as a possible (although not always successful) means of imagining anew-that is, for opening new horizons for thinking about energy cultures.
Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, 2021
This essay examines the imbricated phenomena of colonialist improvement projects, fossil capitali... more This essay examines the imbricated phenomena of colonialist improvement projects, fossil capitalism, and the violent abstractions that gave rise to plantation monocultures and indentured labor, through a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. I interpret the novel as a documentary of an emergent system of “cheap nature” in colonial-era Burma—that is, the commodification of timber, petroleum, and peasant labor—as well as an oil fiction in its attention to the genealogy of the modern petro-state. In tracing the historical confluence of emergent extractive economies and eighteenth and nineteenth-century theories of ontology qua taxonomy through Ghosh’s fictional plantation economies, I likewise argue for the novel as a potent critique of imperial liberalism.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019
This essay situates Jamaal May’s 2014 poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” within a Black Anth... more This essay situates Jamaal May’s 2014 poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” within a Black Anthropocene discourse that traces its genealogy to the work of Octavia Butler, through the writing of contemporary science fiction writers like adrienne maree brown, in order to make clear the intersectional networks of activism and world-making that have long privileged Donna Haraway’s recent mandate to “make kin in edgy times” (2016). I read the poem, in Haraway’s terms, as a “geostory”—“a new story for telling new stories”; and I further suggest that its narrative terrain figures a productive departure from conventional Anthropocene narratives.
Think in Public: A Public Books Reader, 2019
From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspir... more From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the magazine’s distinctive approach to public scholarship. Gathered here are Public Books contributions from today’s leading thinkers, including Jill Lepore, Imani Perry, Kim Phillips-Fein, Salamishah Tillet, Jeremy Adelman, N. D. B. Connolly, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The result is a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change by writers and researchers pushing public debate about these topics in new directions. Think in Public is a lodestone for a rising generation of public scholars and a testament to the power of knowledge.”
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018
This article situates Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People within current discussions about narrat... more This article situates Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People within current discussions about narrative form and the enabling fictions of liberal humanism—its philosophical underpinnings and literary expressions. I argue that in its engagement with materialist questions attendant to slow violence in Bhopal, the novel is surely an “environmental picaresque”—the province of the picaresque novel historically attending to the vagaries of everyday life; but more than a conventional pícaro, Sinha’s titular rogue functions as a memento mori for the western reader. “Animal” is a Faustian presence, whose mutilated form reminds the reader of the folly of economic programs that thrive on human suffering and environmental devastation.
The Global South, Jan 2015
The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the inte... more The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the internally displaced persons who Mike Davis chronicles in his Planet of Slums. These rogues live in the shadows of a new “lettered city”—an imperialist fantasy made possible by the discovery of petrol, if not silver and gold. His tale deploys such picaresque signatures as hunger and privation to critique and expose the real economic consequences of extraction for persons displaced by companies like Shell or Texaco-Chevron, not to mention mining companies across the Global South. Rife with moments of Swiftian abjection, Chris Abani’s picaresque novel GraceLand (2004) is an exemplar of the form. It sutures corporeal depictions of life in Maroko--a slum community on the outskirts of Lagos--within an episodic narrative that defies the chrononormativity of the development paradigm.
Common approaches to Lagos generally evince one of two images: what Matthew Gandy calls “eschatological” images, which recall V.S. Naipaul’s writings, or the utopian landscapes of what recent architects have called “new modes of urbanism.” The latter, in their potential to efface the region’s economic history, are surely no less problematic than the former. This essay proposes that neither image is sufficient to the task of representing the increasingly invisible rogue, who continues to be occluded in our myopic vision of globalization. We might look instead to petro-picaresque novels like Abani’s as a means of navigating the aporia between the actual conditions of the city and the simulacra that saturate popular representations.
Recent Essays & Reviews by Stacey Balkan
Public Books, 2022
T solar markets. Puerto Rican citizens are looking to the sun's abundance as a means of defying t... more T solar markets. Puerto Rican citizens are looking to the sun's abundance as a means of defying the settler politics of today's energy systems, which hinge on the continued disposability of populations like theirs. Hurricane Maria wrought nearly unprecedented devastation, in 2017. But it was the abysmal federal response-along with the proposed privatization of the electric grid, which promises to fatten the pockets of companies like US-Canadian joint venture LUMA Energy-that caused the island to protest. This is why a new vision of solar power has taken root in Puerto Rico. Communitybased nonprofits, like Casa Pueblo, are demanding decentralized solar energy, with an eye to boosting the island's future resilience, as hurricanes and other extreme weather events worsen due to global heating. Similarly, the organization Queremos Sol ("We Want Sun") imagines a state powered by localized solar energy, routed through substations positioned across the island. And Puerto Rico is not alone. Hawaii also boasts a robust solar grid. Outside Detroit, community organizers in Highland Park have founded projects that, like Queremos Sol, attend to both material demands and the historically racialized logics of extant energy networks. Solar power is, of course, already being slotted into existing grids and investment portfolios across the world. This shift is occurring because of increasing awareness of the fact that "the sunlight striking the earth's surface in just one hour delivers enough energy to power the world economy for one year," alongside the belated acknowledgement of the catastrophic consequences of atmospheric carbon. (Although, because of the intermittent nature of solar power, it has yet to gain traction as a marketable alternative to fossil fuels.) But what organizations like Queremos Sol are calling for is something different: a society founded not on scarcity and hierarchy, but, instead, on abundance and equality. They don't just want the sun; they want what energy-justice workers would describe as an "energy commons." They want not only solar power, but a solar politics oriented toward solidarity. The sun has long been celebrated as a source of unbelievable abundance. Socrates famously described it as the source of all life on Earth. Contemporary champions of renewable energy intone a similar (if promethean) sentiment: solar power is the foundation of many forms of planetary life, whether a living flower or a shard of fossilized carbon. Thus, as we find ourselves drowning in the ruins of fossil capitalism, we would do well to marshal the sun's energies toward our survival. Despite the technological promise of solar power, a thorny political question remains: How shall we engage with this abundance? Shall solar power be another filter for global capital to continue profiting off energy? Will solar power be used to prop up fascist states with militarized borders? Or will a different kind of solar power emerge-one that is decentralized and democratic, empowering a politics of liberation even as it powers communities of people during the climate crisis? Will we have solar capitalism, solar fascism, or-perhaps-solarpunk?
Energy Humanities, 2021
An invited essay for a new platform dedicated to research within the Energy Humanities, this arti... more An invited essay for a new platform dedicated to research within the Energy Humanities, this article investigates the relationship between on-line education and extractive capitalism; as well, the myriad of ways in which social-distancing protocols have exacerbated existing forms of inequality in historically marginalized communities across the U.S.
Injustice in the Breeze, 2020
Public Books, 2019
This essay reviews the recent monograph Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure a... more This essay reviews the recent monograph Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development by John G. Stehlin (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with the Global South, 2017
Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. Eds. Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022., 2022
Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy,... more Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory.
Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.
Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, 2022
https://wvupressonline.com/node/896 Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indi... more https://wvupressonline.com/node/896
Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. A materialist history of development on the subcontinent, the project considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, each of which critiques violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of England’s premier trading company and its corporate legatees. In foregrounding the intersection(s) between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy; so too, the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch—those which tend to ignore the uneven histories of industrial development across the Global South. Bringing together extant discussions around settler-colonial practices in India with broader questions around settler ideology and environmental injustice, Rogues concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the subcontinent and beyond.
Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, 2021
https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09158-7.html Oil, like other fossil fuels, p... more https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09158-7.html
Oil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities.
Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states. The chapters engage with African, South American, South Asian, Iranian, and transnational petrofictions and cover topics such as the relationship of colonialism to the fossil fuel economy, issues of gender in the Thermocene epoch, and discussions of migration, precarious labor, and the petro-diaspora. This unique exploration includes testimonies of the oil encounter—through memoirs, journals, and interviews—from a diverse geopolitical grid, ranging from the Permian Basin to the Persian Gulf.
By engaging with non-Western literary responses to petroleum in a concentrated, sustained way, this pathbreaking book illuminates the transnational dimensions of the discourse on oil. It will appeal to scholars and students working in literature and science studies, energy humanities, ecocriticism, petrocriticism, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Henry Obi Ajumeze, Rebecca Babcock, Ashley Dawson, Sharae Deckard, Scott DeVries, Kristen Figgins, Amitav Ghosh, Corbin Hiday, Helen Kapstein, Micheal Angelo Rumore, Simon Ryle, Sheena Stief, Imre Szeman, Maya Vinai, and Wendy W. Walters.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. , 2024
In this essay I examine anti-extractivist climate fictions that model a radical energy politics, ... more In this essay I examine anti-extractivist climate fictions that model a radical energy politics, while also clarifying the central role of the colonial-capitalist transaction at the heart of petromodernity. Centering the twin aims of decarbonization and decolonization, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s 1905 “Sultana’s Dream”—a proto-solarpunk tale set in Victorian India—anticipates such recent fictions as Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s “Listen: A Memoir” in figuring infrastructural possibility and radical hope after the inevitable collapse of fossil capitalism; and each story likewise models a viable energy commons and thus rejects the conventionally dystopian register of much popular climate fiction.
Revue Études Anglaises. Special Issue: “Being Fossil: Energy Humanities 2.0.” Ed. Pablo Mukherjee. , 2021
As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this... more As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this essay I examine three speculative-critical texts that critique fossil capitalism and which demonstrate the ways in which a simple shift in fuel may be insufficient to the task of building a just future. I first read Ursula LeGuin's 1974 novel The Word for World is Forest as a critique of the plantation logic immanent to her fictional "New Tahiti" before turning to Paolo Bacigalupi's 2010 Ship Breaker-set in the blasted landscapes of the southeastern US's petrochemical belt-in order to consider how the dystopian mode may be productive for thinking about energy cultures, but might ultimately trap the reader in an imaginative impasse. I then look to Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe's recent duograph on the wind economies of Mexico's isthmus of Tehuantepec, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019), which poses questions about energopolitics, just futures, and the imbrications of energy, ontology, and power within systems of modern governance, and which I read as a form of speculative anthropology, or (per historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) "philosophical anthropology." The duograph posits the possibility of unsettling what both authors understand as the distorted logic of the Anthropocene age, while examining putative alternatives to petroculture that merely reinforce systemic forms of social and environmental injustice on a global scale. I read each text as a possible (although not always successful) means of imagining anew-that is, for opening new horizons for thinking about energy cultures.
Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, 2021
This essay examines the imbricated phenomena of colonialist improvement projects, fossil capitali... more This essay examines the imbricated phenomena of colonialist improvement projects, fossil capitalism, and the violent abstractions that gave rise to plantation monocultures and indentured labor, through a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. I interpret the novel as a documentary of an emergent system of “cheap nature” in colonial-era Burma—that is, the commodification of timber, petroleum, and peasant labor—as well as an oil fiction in its attention to the genealogy of the modern petro-state. In tracing the historical confluence of emergent extractive economies and eighteenth and nineteenth-century theories of ontology qua taxonomy through Ghosh’s fictional plantation economies, I likewise argue for the novel as a potent critique of imperial liberalism.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019
This essay situates Jamaal May’s 2014 poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” within a Black Anth... more This essay situates Jamaal May’s 2014 poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” within a Black Anthropocene discourse that traces its genealogy to the work of Octavia Butler, through the writing of contemporary science fiction writers like adrienne maree brown, in order to make clear the intersectional networks of activism and world-making that have long privileged Donna Haraway’s recent mandate to “make kin in edgy times” (2016). I read the poem, in Haraway’s terms, as a “geostory”—“a new story for telling new stories”; and I further suggest that its narrative terrain figures a productive departure from conventional Anthropocene narratives.
Think in Public: A Public Books Reader, 2019
From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspir... more From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the magazine’s distinctive approach to public scholarship. Gathered here are Public Books contributions from today’s leading thinkers, including Jill Lepore, Imani Perry, Kim Phillips-Fein, Salamishah Tillet, Jeremy Adelman, N. D. B. Connolly, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The result is a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change by writers and researchers pushing public debate about these topics in new directions. Think in Public is a lodestone for a rising generation of public scholars and a testament to the power of knowledge.”
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018
This article situates Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People within current discussions about narrat... more This article situates Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People within current discussions about narrative form and the enabling fictions of liberal humanism—its philosophical underpinnings and literary expressions. I argue that in its engagement with materialist questions attendant to slow violence in Bhopal, the novel is surely an “environmental picaresque”—the province of the picaresque novel historically attending to the vagaries of everyday life; but more than a conventional pícaro, Sinha’s titular rogue functions as a memento mori for the western reader. “Animal” is a Faustian presence, whose mutilated form reminds the reader of the folly of economic programs that thrive on human suffering and environmental devastation.
The Global South, Jan 2015
The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the inte... more The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the internally displaced persons who Mike Davis chronicles in his Planet of Slums. These rogues live in the shadows of a new “lettered city”—an imperialist fantasy made possible by the discovery of petrol, if not silver and gold. His tale deploys such picaresque signatures as hunger and privation to critique and expose the real economic consequences of extraction for persons displaced by companies like Shell or Texaco-Chevron, not to mention mining companies across the Global South. Rife with moments of Swiftian abjection, Chris Abani’s picaresque novel GraceLand (2004) is an exemplar of the form. It sutures corporeal depictions of life in Maroko--a slum community on the outskirts of Lagos--within an episodic narrative that defies the chrononormativity of the development paradigm.
Common approaches to Lagos generally evince one of two images: what Matthew Gandy calls “eschatological” images, which recall V.S. Naipaul’s writings, or the utopian landscapes of what recent architects have called “new modes of urbanism.” The latter, in their potential to efface the region’s economic history, are surely no less problematic than the former. This essay proposes that neither image is sufficient to the task of representing the increasingly invisible rogue, who continues to be occluded in our myopic vision of globalization. We might look instead to petro-picaresque novels like Abani’s as a means of navigating the aporia between the actual conditions of the city and the simulacra that saturate popular representations.
Public Books, 2022
T solar markets. Puerto Rican citizens are looking to the sun's abundance as a means of defying t... more T solar markets. Puerto Rican citizens are looking to the sun's abundance as a means of defying the settler politics of today's energy systems, which hinge on the continued disposability of populations like theirs. Hurricane Maria wrought nearly unprecedented devastation, in 2017. But it was the abysmal federal response-along with the proposed privatization of the electric grid, which promises to fatten the pockets of companies like US-Canadian joint venture LUMA Energy-that caused the island to protest. This is why a new vision of solar power has taken root in Puerto Rico. Communitybased nonprofits, like Casa Pueblo, are demanding decentralized solar energy, with an eye to boosting the island's future resilience, as hurricanes and other extreme weather events worsen due to global heating. Similarly, the organization Queremos Sol ("We Want Sun") imagines a state powered by localized solar energy, routed through substations positioned across the island. And Puerto Rico is not alone. Hawaii also boasts a robust solar grid. Outside Detroit, community organizers in Highland Park have founded projects that, like Queremos Sol, attend to both material demands and the historically racialized logics of extant energy networks. Solar power is, of course, already being slotted into existing grids and investment portfolios across the world. This shift is occurring because of increasing awareness of the fact that "the sunlight striking the earth's surface in just one hour delivers enough energy to power the world economy for one year," alongside the belated acknowledgement of the catastrophic consequences of atmospheric carbon. (Although, because of the intermittent nature of solar power, it has yet to gain traction as a marketable alternative to fossil fuels.) But what organizations like Queremos Sol are calling for is something different: a society founded not on scarcity and hierarchy, but, instead, on abundance and equality. They don't just want the sun; they want what energy-justice workers would describe as an "energy commons." They want not only solar power, but a solar politics oriented toward solidarity. The sun has long been celebrated as a source of unbelievable abundance. Socrates famously described it as the source of all life on Earth. Contemporary champions of renewable energy intone a similar (if promethean) sentiment: solar power is the foundation of many forms of planetary life, whether a living flower or a shard of fossilized carbon. Thus, as we find ourselves drowning in the ruins of fossil capitalism, we would do well to marshal the sun's energies toward our survival. Despite the technological promise of solar power, a thorny political question remains: How shall we engage with this abundance? Shall solar power be another filter for global capital to continue profiting off energy? Will solar power be used to prop up fascist states with militarized borders? Or will a different kind of solar power emerge-one that is decentralized and democratic, empowering a politics of liberation even as it powers communities of people during the climate crisis? Will we have solar capitalism, solar fascism, or-perhaps-solarpunk?
Energy Humanities, 2021
An invited essay for a new platform dedicated to research within the Energy Humanities, this arti... more An invited essay for a new platform dedicated to research within the Energy Humanities, this article investigates the relationship between on-line education and extractive capitalism; as well, the myriad of ways in which social-distancing protocols have exacerbated existing forms of inequality in historically marginalized communities across the U.S.
Injustice in the Breeze, 2020
Public Books, 2019
This essay reviews the recent monograph Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure a... more This essay reviews the recent monograph Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development by John G. Stehlin (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with the Global South, 2017
Public Books, 2016
"Anthropocene and Empire" contextualizes Amitav Ghosh's 2016 monograph The Great Derangement: Cli... more "Anthropocene and Empire" contextualizes Amitav Ghosh's 2016 monograph The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable within the broader ouvre of the author's work in addition to problematizing popular Anthropocene timescales that eschew the longue durée of uneven development and extractive capitalism.
Course Syllabus, 2023
Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stori... more Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. We will seek to unsettle conventional categories of “world” as we carefully reorient ourselves in relation to the texts under study—novels, stories, and poems that demand a rearticulation of the so-called “archetype.” As we travel across continents, guided by Imbolo Mbue or Helena María Viramontes, we will consider the trajectories of power that they map and the aesthetic forms that are neither universal nor derivative, but persistently and indignantly local—that is, materially and historically situated. We will begin with a consideration of the political stakes of “worlding” literature before embarking on a three-pronged journey: texts that map empire; stories that illuminate the sacrifice zones of our contemporary petrosphere; and narratives that demand a consideration of the role of energy in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of aesthetic form.
Required texts:
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, ISBN-13: 978-1583670255
Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, ISBN-13: 978-0312428594
Shailja Patel, Migritude, ISBN-13: 978-1885030054
Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus ISBN-13: 978-0452273870
*All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.
Course Syllabus, 2023
Course Description: What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of en... more 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 “Reading Energy,” 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 or “solarity” literally fuel culture. We shall explore a wide archive of 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; and we shall move across various energy “ages” in order to arrive in the critical-utopian landscape of solarpunk—a genre that presents a viable and convivial world after extraction, and one that rejects the dystopian alarmism of conventional climate fiction. Writers including Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Rokeya Hossein, Nawal El Saadawi, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Patrick Chamoiseau will serve as our guides as we explore the intersections between cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression.
Required Texts:
Elly Blue, Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures, ISBN-13: 978-1621062066
Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6
Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built, ISBN: 978-1-250-23621-0
Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest, ISBN-13: 978-0765324641
Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus, ISBN-13: 978-0452273870
*All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.
Postcolonial Studies has long been animated by questions of power—particularly regarding the role... more Postcolonial Studies has long been animated by questions of power—particularly regarding the role of empire in the crafting of “histories and geographies.” Theorizing empire has been a central preoccupation of postcolonial critics who define this political phenomenon in terms of imperial sovereignty, or a system of governance in which an imperial hegemon (or ruling power) like Great Britain maintains sovereignty (or rule) over another nation or nations. The colonial-imperial project as it was conceived by such empires hinged on the dismantling of local cultures and also of local ecosystems—the latter allowing for the imposition of colonial-era plantation regimes that would produce cash crops like sugar, cotton, and poppy. Focusing on such plantation economies, postcolonial studies began primarily as an interrogation of what critics call “the land question.”
But scholars interested in what we shall understand as “imperial liberalism” recognize that any perceived split between the material and ideological bases of colonial conquest is a fallacious one. Thus, the field of Postcolonial Studies was transformed in the 1980s with the emergence of Subaltern Studies—notable both for a shift in thinking from imperialism tout court to what Edward Said would call “cultural imperialism,” but likewise for bringing together the putatively separate spheres of the material and the discursive. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would notably call our attention to forms of epistemic violence like the vast omission of subaltern voices in historical archives, while historians like Dipesh Chakrabarty would contextualize such forms of violence within the context of (e.g.) striking jute mill workers in occupied Bengal. While critics of Subaltern Studies like Vivek Chibber indict the field for eschewing such material questions, this is
demonstrably false.
Debates within the field also center on geography and periodization. As regards the former,
in the 1950s calls for “non-alignment” would illuminate the ways in which imperial geographies that centralized Britain failed to account for the robust political relationships between nations of the “Global South”—a problem further troubled by thinkers like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in the 1980s. So too, as we begin to acknowledge what David Harvey terms “the new imperialism,” the very notion of a “post”-colonial world comes into question. To what extent can we identify a discernible split—whether materially and/or ideologically—between past and present? What’s more, how do corporations like Coca-Cola or Texaco-Chevron reproduce practices historically associated with imperial hegemons like Britain or Spain? And finally, in the context of so-called postcolonial environments, how do we ignore the presence of material registers of the past—whether the irradiated soil of India’s mineral belt, or that of the southwestern United States’s abandoned uranium fields? As a course in Postcolonial Literatures, we will grapple with both representational questions as well as material ones: questions about culture and identity as well as questions about land. Writers including Aimé Cesairé, Edward Said, Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh, Shailja Patel, Tommy Pico, Arundhati Roy, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, Zadie Smith, Mahasweta Devi, Shailja Patel, and Ken Saro-Wiwa will serve as our guides as we explore what we might consider three generations of postcolonial thought.
Course Description: What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of en... more 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.
Syllabus for introductory Energy & Literature course.
Office: Bldg. 97, CU325 Spring 2019 office hours: Wednesdays 2:00pm -4:00pm (Davie), Fridays 1:00... more Office: Bldg. 97, CU325 Spring 2019 office hours: Wednesdays 2:00pm -4:00pm (Davie), Fridays 1:00pm -3:00pm, and by appointment. English Dept. Office: 561-297-3830 LIT4244 Major Writers, World Literature in English Wednesday 4:00pm -6:50pm, ES108 "'Stories' are simultaneously 'maps' in that they mobilize both histories and geographies of power"-M. Jacqui Alexander & Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Course description: Interest in matter—its entanglements in human and more-than-human ecologies—h... more Course description:
Interest in matter—its entanglements in human and more-than-human ecologies—has lately increased amongst scholars in the Humanities eager to exercise a “more ecological sensibility” (Bennett). Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has proposed that we view nature “in terms of dynamic forces, fields of transformation and upheaval, rather than as a static fixity, passive, worked over, transformed and dynamized only by culture” (Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 2005). Part of a cluster of thinkers who constitute the New Materialist turn of the early twenty-first century, Grosz and others aim to unsettle the partitioning of human and nonhuman matter so central to modern intellectual practice.
The so-called Cartesian revolution of the early modern period, articulated in René Descartes’s 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, is often credited with enabling new taxonomic categories—primary and secondary expressions of matter, subject and object, Human and Nature— that would make possible the exploitation of natural resources and the human communities imaginatively tethered to them. Less a formal species designation than a restrictive category denoting a small segment of the population, the “Human” as such is a vexed referent for a particular type— European, male—against which the category of the nonhuman is made possible. As a course in New Materialisms, such categories—human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate—will be our central preoccupation. We will read broadly and across disciplinary divides as we seek to understand the place of the no-longer-embodied human in the Anthropocene. We thus begin with a brief overview of our dystopian present, and the role of what Didier Debaise calls the “cosmology of the
moderns,” before moving on to discussions about the agency, ontology, and nature of matter.
As this is a course not in “New Materialism” but “New Materialisms,” we will ultimately move beyond the initiating categories of the field to explore materialist critiques of energy and the networks of extraction and consumption that fuel “modern” culture. We will then close the semester with various dispatches from the “World of Matter” collective along with a few useful guides to “world-making” in the Anthropocene (Streeby). Course readings will include work by Stacy Alaimo, A.R. Ammons, Jane Bennett, William Connelly, Diana Coole, John Bellamy Foster, Samantha Frost, Donna Haraway, Eben Kirksey, Andreas Malm, Karl Marx, Jamaal May, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Muriel Rukeyser, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
Course Description: Postcolonial Environments are places where the social and environmental legac... more Course Description: Postcolonial Environments are places where the social and environmental legacy of colonial occupation finds artistic expression in literatures that antagonize conventional approaches to " nature " or " wilderness. " As a study of Postcolonial Environments, this seminar will explore the imbricated chronologies of aesthetics, landscape ideology, and historical trauma. We will examine the colonial origins of modern development, or "improvement," as the material basis of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime, for example, paying particular attention to the forced removal of local communities through parliamentary enclosure or corporate mandate. Writers interested in the " land question, " from Aimé Césaire to Ranajit Guha to Jamaica Kincaid to Arundhati Roy to Rob Nixon, will serve as our guides as we explore the lasting impact of colonial-era systems of land tenure on postcolonial states. Among the many questions animating the course, we shall ask: how do we bring together the historically polarized and polarizing discussions around Postcolonialism and Environmentalism? Furthermore, how, in an era marked by cataclysmic shifts in our global climate can we begin to think collectively about the fate of our species without eschewing the long history of combined and uneven development that has rendered postcolonial states more vulnerable to the exigencies of climate change? In addition to the theoretical readings outlined above, we will read fiction and poetry from Class requirements and Policies: 1. Weekly discussion posts. You may respond to the readings in a variety of ways: offer a close reading of one of the primary literary works; pose a series of engaging questions about the texts under discussion; examine one of the texts using a relevant theoretical lens; discuss a theme that has been developing in the course; recap and build on earlier conversations using the new material of the day. These postings must be made no later than 5pm each Tuesday.
Survey course in literature and environment.
In his recent lectures on climate change, novelist Amitav Ghosh remarked on the persistent role o... more In his recent lectures on climate change, novelist Amitav Ghosh remarked on the persistent role of empire in the dispossession of communities throughout the Global South generally, and India in particular—the uneven effects of climate change the “result of systems that were set up by brute force to ensure that poor nations remained always at a disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power.” Given the coincidence of European imperialism and the so-called “great acceleration”—a period traced to the 18th century when Britain’s premier trading company was acquiring an exclusive writ of free trade for the purpose of growing and selling opium—Ghosh argues that we must expand our indictment of capitalism to include “an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism.”
Moving “beyond the postcolonial,” Ghosh’s argument is a distinctly materialist one—carbon and opium replacing the familiar tropes of postcolonial or diasporic identity. The lectures, like his recent Ibis Trilogy, are thus aligned with the emergent field of postcolonial eco-criticism, which seeks to reconcile postcolonial discourse with such materialist concerns.
Illustrating the relevance of the imperial-colonial project to neoliberal globalization, the trilogy also offers a commentary on the establishment of free-trade in the region; the concomitant enclosure of peasant land; and such modes of epistemological violence as the cooptation of local language systems and, perhaps especially, local flora.
The latter is the central focus of Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011) in which the character Zachary Reid likens the Company’s botanical gardens to the hull of a slave ship. This paper reads River of Smoke from a postcolonial eco-critical perspective, arguing for a more complicated understanding of the colonial episteme—foregrounding, to cite Partha Chatterjee, the “fruits” of Linnaeus’s “poison tree” rather than Macaulay’s.
In his 1907 The Literature of Roguery, Frank Wadleigh Chandler comments on the peculiar nature of... more In his 1907 The Literature of Roguery, Frank Wadleigh Chandler comments on the peculiar nature of the picaresque form—a genre that would centralize images of “low life” in the face of novelistic traditions that generally favored more heroic protagonists. Indeed, literary humanism had no place for the vagaries of the everyday. Thus, the picaresque art of survival—rendered through grotesque figurations of hunger and privation—emerges in the sixteenth century as a dark mirror, a means of forcing Spanish decadence into sharp focus. Foregrounding privation, picaresque novels functioned as a sort of aesthetic relief—the pícaro, or rogue, at the novel’s center a memento mori for readers content to ignore the disparate terrain of early modern capitalism.
Cast against proto-Enlightenment conceptions of the human—a rational subject, who figures in aspirational narratives, which favor the ideal over and against the corporeal—the pícaro in such works anticipates the rogue in the postcolony, whose narrative terrain conjures what we might call the heterotopia of late capitalism. This is precisely the case in Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People in which the titular rogue, a survivor of the 1984 chemical explosion in Bhopal, cultivates a home out of the detritus of the Union Carbide factory.
With a particular focus on “Animal’s” excessive corporeality, this paper situates Sinha’s novel within current discussions about narrative form, the so-called “enabling fictions” of liberal humanism, and the system of global apartheid in which the third world functions as a repository for toxicity and waste.
Postcolonial ecocriticism—in Rob Nixon’s formulation as well as the move toward radical materiali... more Postcolonial ecocriticism—in Rob Nixon’s formulation as well as the move toward radical materialism (Jane Bennett, Karen Barad)—has been complicated recently by new questions surrounding subaltern agency in the Anthropocene. Dipesh Chakrabarty notably troubled the move toward post-humanist (and eco-centric) thinking in his 2008 article on climate change. His piece highlights divisions in postcolonial thought (e.g., between Vivek Chibber and the subaltern studies project) along with the potential resurgence of Enlightenment-inflected notions of agency as the discourse of climate change increasingly tends toward species-level thinking.
Owing to what seems a persistent aporia between the postcolonial and the ecocritical, I argue that literary works, which question the nature of the human within what Pablo Mukherjee calls the “entangled” field of the “postcolonial environment” are quite generative. I thus read Nixon’s recent work on slow violence and narration—his “environmental picaresque”—as a critical intervention that opens up new avenues for discussion, which neither deny the important work of posthumanism, nor that instrumentalize subaltern persons.
While Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is usually invoked as an exemplar of postcolonial ecocriticism, in this paper I turn to his Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011)—exemplars of Nixon’s environmental picaresque—to argue for an aesthetic means of evincing a particular (subaltern) history that neither instrumentalizes the postcolonial subject, nor that privileges a demiurgic model of the postcolonial environment.
Edited collection to include essays on the oil encounter in postcolonial states.
Penn State University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2021
Etudes Anglaises, May 7, 2021
Cet article met en regard trois textes spéculatifs qui, chacun à sa manière, proposent une critiq... more Cet article met en regard trois textes spéculatifs qui, chacun à sa manière, proposent une critique du capitalisme fossile et permettent d’imaginer un futur désarrimé du pouvoir qu’exercent sur nous les énergies fossiles. Tous montrent qu’un simple changement dans notre consommation de combustibles ne suffira pas à établir un futur plus équitable. L’étude s’intéresse d’abord au roman d’Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest (1974), et montre que l’utopie d’une « Nouvelle Tahiti » qui s’y donne à lire est indissociable d’une vision critique de la logique de la plantation sur laquelle elle se fonde. L’analyse porte ensuite sur Ship Breaker de Paolo Bacigalupi (2010), dont l’intrigue se déroule au milieu des paysages dévastés de la « ceinture pétrochimique » du sud-est des États-Unis. Si le mode dystopique sur lequel est construit ce roman permet de réfléchir à la culture qu’ont produite les énergies fossiles, il ne permet cependant pas son dépassement et conduit finalement le lecteur à une impasse. La dernière partie de l’article porte sur le diptyque que Dominic Boyer et Cymene Howe ont consacré aux énergies éoliennes dans l’isthme de Tehuantepec au Mexique : Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019). À la faveur d’une forme d’anthropologie spéculative — ce que Dipesh Chakrabarty appelle une « anthropologie philosophique » — Boyer et Howe problématisent la question des politiques énergétiques, celle d’un futur équitable et la façon dont, dans les systèmes de gouvernance modernes, la pratique du pouvoir est toujours liée à des enjeux énergétiques et ontologiques. Ils font ainsi vaciller la logique même qui régit l’âge de l’Anthropocène, tout en révélant combien les alternatives supposées à la pétro-culture contribuent en réalité à renforcer des formes d’injustice sociale et environnementale à l’échelle mondiale. Au bout du compte, chacun de ces textes permet de commencer, sans toujours y parvenir totalement, à imaginer de nouvelles manières de penser l’impact culturel des énergies fossiles.
The Global South, 2015
ABSTRACT:The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of... more ABSTRACT:The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the internally displaced persons who Mike Davis chronicles in his Planet of Slums (2006). This particular rogue lives in the shadows of a new “lettered city”—an imperialist fantasy made possible by the discovery of petrol, if not silver and gold. His tale deploys such picaresque signatures as hunger and privation to critique and expose the real economic consequences of persons displaced by companies like Shell or Texaco-Chevron, not to mention mining companies across the Global South. Rife with moments of Swiftian abjection, Chris Abani’s picaresque novel GraceLand (2004) is an exemplar of the form. It sutures corporeal depictions of life in Maroko—a slum community on the outskirts of Lagos—within an episodic narrative that defies the chrono-normativity of the development paradigm.Common approaches to Lagos generally evince one of two images: what Matthew Gandy calls “eschatological” images, which recall V.S. Naipaul’s writings, or the utopian landscapes of what recent architects have called “new modes of urbanism.” The latter, in their potential to efface the region’s economic history, are surely no less problematic than the former. This essay proposes that neither image is sufficient to the task of representing the increasingly invisible rogue, who continues to be occluded in our myopic vision of globalization. We might look instead to petro-picaresque novels like Abani’s as a means of navigating the aporia between the actual conditions of the city and the simulacra that saturate popular representations.
Foundation Books, Jun 17, 2014
Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 2018
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspir... more From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the magazine’s distinctive approach to public scholarship. Gathered here are Public Books contributions from today’s leading thinkers, including Jill Lepore, Imani Perry, Kim Phillips-Fein, Salamishah Tillet, Jeremy Adelman, N. D. B. Connolly, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The result is a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change by writers and researchers pushing public debate about these topics in new directions. Think in Public is a lodestone for a rising generation of public scholars and a testament to the power of knowledge.”
Rogues in the Postcolony looks at Indian picaresque novels that respond to and productively compl... more Rogues in the Postcolony looks at Indian picaresque novels that respond to and productively complicate dominant historical narratives by adapting formal conventions of the picaresque novel and by foregrounding the experiences of historically obscured figures, or “rogues.” The project is structured in such a way as to read colonial and postcolonial India through the lens of marginalized persons such as poppy farmers and, more recently, the citizens of Bhopal who continue to struggle with the toxic legacy of the Union Carbide fertilizer factory in their city. I argue that the unreliable narration and non-teleological structure of the picaresque form parody the developmentalist pretenses of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. These itinerant and episodic narratives instead constitute an aesthetics of indigence that bring into sharp focus what critic Giancarlo Maiorino calls the “low life” of the working-class protagonist, or Micheal Serres’s “tactician of the quotidian.” I first read Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, which is set during the Opium Wars in the Bay of Bengal, as (in many respects) a response to and refutation of Thomas De Quincey’s notorious opium essays—both the memoirs and his political essays on India and China—as well as the work that John Stuart Mill would publish during his tenure with the East India Company. Ghosh’s rogues, I argue, body forth the vast elisions in the colonial archive, and even in more progressive histories of the region published in the last century. I then turn to narratives of the nation and its formation. I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a satirical critique of India’s 1947 “tryst with destiny”—Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous characterization of Indian independence; and I also consider Aravind Adiga’s similarly scathing The White Tiger as an indictment of the 1991 tryst in which the “new India” is envisaged as a sort of neoliberal utopia. Both novels, I argue, respond to Partha Chatterjee’s call for a means of attending not merely to the narrowly imagined community of the nation-state, but to its many fragments. In the final section, I turn to this “new India”—a phenomenon read by many as a model of democracy and the merits of the free market. I read Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as both a picaresque indictment of the development logic that subtends popular globalization narratives, and also as a postcolonial memento mori tale owing to Sinha’s grotesque pícaro. Sinha’s novel illustrates the human costs of free trade and enclosure across the Global South
Penn State University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2021
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019
Études anglaises, 2021
Cet article met en regard trois textes speculatifs qui, chacun a sa maniere, proposent une critiq... more Cet article met en regard trois textes speculatifs qui, chacun a sa maniere, proposent une critique du capitalisme fossile et permettent d’imaginer un futur desarrime du pouvoir qu’exercent sur nous les energies fossiles. Tous montrent qu’un simple changement dans notre consommation de combustibles ne suffira pas a etablir un futur plus equitable. L’etude s’interesse d’abord au roman d’Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest (1974), et montre que l’utopie d’une « Nouvelle Tahiti » qui s’y donne a lire est indissociable d’une vision critique de la logique de la plantation sur laquelle elle se fonde. L’analyse porte ensuite sur Ship Breaker de Paolo Bacigalupi (2010), dont l’intrigue se deroule au milieu des paysages devastes de la « ceinture petrochimique » du sud-est des Etats-Unis. Si le mode dystopique sur lequel est construit ce roman permet de reflechir a la culture qu’ont produite les energies fossiles, il ne permet cependant pas son depassement et conduit finalement le lecteur a une impasse. La derniere partie de l’article porte sur le diptyque que Dominic Boyer et Cymene Howe ont consacre aux energies eoliennes dans l’isthme de Tehuantepec au Mexique : Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019). A la faveur d’une forme d’anthropologie speculative — ce que Dipesh Chakrabarty appelle une « anthropologie philosophique » — Boyer et Howe problematisent la question des politiques energetiques, celle d’un futur equitable et la facon dont, dans les systemes de gouvernance modernes, la pratique du pouvoir est toujours liee a des enjeux energetiques et ontologiques. Ils font ainsi vaciller la logique meme qui regit l’âge de l’Anthropocene, tout en revelant combien les alternatives supposees a la petro-culture contribuent en realite a renforcer des formes d’injustice sociale et environnementale a l’echelle mondiale. Au bout du compte, chacun de ces textes permet de commencer, sans toujours y parvenir totalement, a imaginer de nouvelles manieres de penser l’impact culturel des energies fossiles.
From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspir... more From the publisher’s site: “Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the magazine’s distinctive approach to public scholarship. Gathered here are Public Books contributions from today’s leading thinkers, including Jill Lepore, Imani Perry, Kim Phillips-Fein, Salamishah Tillet, Jeremy Adelman, N. D. B. Connolly, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The result is a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change by writers and researchers pushing public debate about these topics in new directions. Think in Public is a lodestone for a rising generation of public scholars and a testament to the power of knowledge.”
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018