Abstract
AbstractThis essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes'sUnder the Feet of Jesus(1995) and Colson Whitehead'sZone One(2011) andThe Underground Railroad(2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.
Publisher
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
15 articles.
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