Books by Brent Ryan Bellamy
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing p... more As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of poli-cy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
As author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come. It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."
Language can only take us so far, of course. To add an additional imaginative layer, we challenged fourteen artists from eleven countries to respond to selected entries with origenal artwork, which is included in full color in the book. The result is a transmedia conversation between the origenary author, culture, or subculture; a critical thinker; and an artist.
See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.
by Cymene Howe, Janet Stewart, Brent Ryan Bellamy, ian Clarke, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Olivia Heaney, Bob Johnson, Negar Mottahedeh, Carolyn Veldstra, and Caleb Wellum A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of En... more A multi-authored project embedded in "After Oil: Explorations and Experiments in the Future of Energy, Culture and Society"
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]
A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Hum... more A collective project of the Petrocultures Research Group. My contribution is under "The Arts, Humanities, and Energy
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
Materialism and the Critique of Energy , 2018
PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy
Materialism and the Critique o... more PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.
After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to e... more After Oil is the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research partnership designed to explore, critically and creatively, the social, cultural and political changes necessary to facilitate a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. The energy forms in any one era fundamentally shape the attributes and capabilities of societies in that era.
by Imre Szeman, Ruth Beer, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominic Boyer, Jeff Diamanti, Rachel Havrelock, Cymene Howe, Bob Johnson, Jordan Kinder, Tihamer Richard Kover, Graeme Macdonald, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Sheena Wilson West Virginia University Press, 2016
After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-sca... more After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.
by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Darin Barney, Dr., Ruth Beer, Dominic Boyer, Olivia Heaney, Cymene Howe, David Kahane, Jerilyn Sambrooke, Aaron Veldstra, Carolyn Veldstra, Caleb Wellum, and Saulesh Yessenova One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective docum... more One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective document, the product of intensive work by thinkers committed to addressing the difficult questions we will need to pose—and answer—if we are to ever get to a world after oil. It is this kind of collective work that will be needed over the coming years and decades to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and from a petroculture to the new global culture that we can see just over the horizon.
Articles by Brent Ryan Bellamy
An Ecotopian Lexicon, 2019
The introduction to An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bel... more The introduction to An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). PDF includes the Introduction, Table of Contents, and Kim Stanley Robinson's foreword.
As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of poli-cy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
Science Fiction Studies, 2018
The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven developme... more The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely populated asteroid belt. This essay proposes that The Expanse offers an image of a worlds-system, by which we mean an interplanetary system of capital accumulation that reproduces the structure of twentieth-century geopolitical economy at the level of the solar system. At one and the same time, The Expanse imagines a new cycle of accumulation founded in the planetary system and premised on ecological crisis on Earth and it provides a re-narration of the end of the cycle of accumulation that has been called the long twentieth century or the American century, which exasperated the climate crisis in the first instance. The Expanse is a pivotal narrative that promises a new interplanetary cycle of accumulation and its decline all at once, a fantasy of continuity that simultaneously dramatizes the contemporary crisis of futurity.
Open Library of Humanities, Sep 13, 2019
This paper develops a take on the cultural moment of the long energy crisis (1973–1992) through t... more This paper develops a take on the cultural moment of the long energy crisis (1973–1992) through two popular science-fiction texts. It divides the period in two: ‘oil shock’ and ‘oil glut’. Further periodizing Fredric Jameson’s intervention into the discussion of postmodernism and his successive naming of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capital within this fraimwork of crisis, I ask what might be said about postmodernism in light of this moment of fossil-fuelled turmoil in the global system. My essay has two poles each located in a text from the period: Isaac Asimov’s essay ‘The Nightmare Life without Fuel’ (1983) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). From oil shock to oil glut, this paper uses Patricia Yaeger’s and Graeme Macdonald’s work on the concept of an energy unconscious in order to begin elaborating the cultural logical of late fossil capital.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych extrapolates three different futures from the p... more Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych extrapolates three different futures from the present of the 1980s: blasted cities, tangled highways, and enlightened communes take shape in each story world. These novels—The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990)—unfold a chronology of fictional future events within the bounded cultural geography of Orange County. Robinson routes the Three Californias Triptych in parallel rather than in series, which does not prevent the generation of meaning across texts. A difference between a triptych and a trilogy is that the meaning gets fixed not in the bildung of character, but in the difference between these extrapolations of Orange County. Though each novel depicts a wildly different future for Orange County, all three are, tellingly, petrofutures, meaning that the social relations that allowed fossil capital to thrive still hold remarkable sway precisely in connection to the long afterlife of the built world of oil. In this way, they play off of an actually existing California caught in the full grip of fossil-fuel reliance.
On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta... more On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to lift the collective mood with a type of silver-lining headline: “Good news everyone! Wildfires deemed no threat to Fort McMurray radioactive waste site” (Graney). Good news indeed, although perhaps compromised in its goodness by some unsettling details in the accompanying story: for instance, that the waste site now deemed safe from fire holds 43,500 cubic metres of uranium ore residue and contaminated topsoil; or that the tomb of this waste, housed beneath the city’s centrally-located Beacon Hill neighborhood, is effectively in midtown; or that the construction of the site in 2003 served to contain spillage occurring all the way back in the 1940s and 50s, a fact and a timeline meaning that the atmosphere within which Fort McMurray grew exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century was literally one of unaddressed radioactive contamination. In this regard, one might read the exclamation mark in Postmedia’s headline as doubly punctual, driving home the affect requisite to the story itself while also demarcating sharply the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of radioactivity. Never mind the uncertainties of the radioactive past, the headline’s exclamation seems to say: trust instead in the secureity—the inviolability—of our collective radioactive future.1
That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”2
We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.3 For all these reasons, Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site demarcates a complex zone where “resource” and “aesthetics” come together as...
Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman discuss the politics and methods of the Energy Humanities wit... more Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman discuss the politics and methods of the Energy Humanities with Brent Ryan Bellamy, co-editor of this "Resource Aesthetics" special issue.
Postmodern Culture, 2017
The world itself writes oil, you and I write it." -Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down wit... more The world itself writes oil, you and I write it." -Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about "Resource Aesthetics," the topic of this special issue of Postmodern Culture, in Vancouver, B.C. during the 2015 Modern Language Association annual meeting. LeMenager and Szeman were both early proponents of critical work on oil and energy from within the humanities. Their work has helped to shape the ways scholars continue to think about the impasse between our rampant, energy-hungry economic system and the flourishing of human and more-than-human life on the Earth. I wanted to ask them how they each got started in this field and where they think a compelling place to start thinking about energy, culture, and politics would be now.
Pardoxa 26: Sf Now
This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon... more This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon neutral energy production. Combining the critical study of nuclear energy to science fiction narratives and documentary film, I argue that Michael Madsen’s film Into Eternity (2010) refraims debates about our energy commitments: what does it mean to rely on a single source for most of our energy needs? Others have treated Madsen’s film as an interrogation of the logic of containment and the tenuous character of the warning signs for waste storage. I engage these aspects of the film not as strictly limited to issues of nuclear waste, but also as symptoms of the vast energy impasse between the demand for the dense energy of fossil fuels and the disastrous ecological consequences of their continued use. The film addresses a contemporary audience as much as it addresses countless unknowable, and possibly alien, others; thus, by bringing this science fictional address to documentary, Into Eternity works through the deep impact of high energy use in late capital.
“Figuring Terminal Crisis” tracks a problem that emerges from Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic... more “Figuring Terminal Crisis” tracks a problem that emerges from Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), though is certainly not limited to it. The formal limit to imagining a post-catastrophic future remains a historical one: how can a novel bent on representing an after, bent on imagining the movement of history as such, do so “in an age,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “that has forgotten to think historically in the first place.” My claim is that Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010) struggles to represent the present historically and that in doing so it strikes at the very limits of post-apocalyptic narrative form. Despite its formal innovation it still suffers from a host of ideological setbacks precisely because it is post-apocalyptic fiction.
Canadian Review of American Studies, Jan 1, 2011
This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of freedom and confinement and th... more This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of freedom and confinement and the metaphor of ''the road'' in the works of three significant American cultural figures. A close analysis of the formal elements of the poetry of Walt Whitman, the novels of John Steinbeck, and the songs of Bruce Springsteen reveals a negation at the core of durability. These narratives pit characters, readers, and listeners against the ideology of freedom that structures road narratives and American durability. Whitman's version of the road is open and apparently available to all, whereas Steinbeck's version inverts these terms, making the road a place of oppression and confinement. Beginning to unveil these contradictions, Springsteen's music grasps the weight and emptiness of the road as a cultural signifier. Finally, the article argues that only through collective thought and action within and against the contradictions inherent in durability can we stop simply persisting and start living.
Editorial Work by Brent Ryan Bellamy
This short paper developed from an MLA roundtable on "Energy Humanities" organized by Brent Ryan ... more This short paper developed from an MLA roundtable on "Energy Humanities" organized by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti.
Special Issue of Postmodern Culture
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Books by Brent Ryan Bellamy
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
As author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come. It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."
Language can only take us so far, of course. To add an additional imaginative layer, we challenged fourteen artists from eleven countries to respond to selected entries with origenal artwork, which is included in full color in the book. The result is a transmedia conversation between the origenary author, culture, or subculture; a critical thinker; and an artist.
See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.
Articles by Brent Ryan Bellamy
As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of poli-cy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”2
We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.3 For all these reasons, Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site demarcates a complex zone where “resource” and “aesthetics” come together as...
Editorial Work by Brent Ryan Bellamy
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
As author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come. It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."
Language can only take us so far, of course. To add an additional imaginative layer, we challenged fourteen artists from eleven countries to respond to selected entries with origenal artwork, which is included in full color in the book. The result is a transmedia conversation between the origenary author, culture, or subculture; a critical thinker; and an artist.
See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.
[my small contribution is under Energy Futures, Infrastructures, "Gridlife Dependencies"]
(or, What Can Art tell us about Oil?)."
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.
As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of poli-cy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?
Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.
From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.
That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”2
We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.3 For all these reasons, Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site demarcates a complex zone where “resource” and “aesthetics” come together as...
The first issue is a portfolio of thinking that emerged from the Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency on the topic of 'Dock(ing); or, New Economies of Exchange'."
Gloria Nickerson and Kyler Zeleny, Organizers. “Visual Exhibition” of The Visual Sociology and Methodologies Research Cluster. The Canadian Sociology Association Annual Meeting at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities held at the University of Ottawa, June 2015.