Er(r)go. Theory – Literature – Culture: thematic issue “fuel/energy/culture”
2020-08-09
Next issue – 44 (1/2022) fuel/energy/culture
(English-Polish – call open)
Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, societies, and culture. The means of its production, distribution, consumption and wasting constitute the material sub-base of all manifestations of life, also shaping the discursive superstructure in which they function. The perspective offered by energy humanities considers fuels, the energy generated by them, and the infrastructures of this generation (material, political, philosophical) as both the subjects of research and the prisms through which to consider existing forms of production, including cultural production, primarily in the context of the history of capitalism, the Anthropocene or, more aptly, the Capitalocene.
The cultural history of fuels, fossil fuels in particular, reveals their material complicity in the history of colonialism, the rise of modernity, and the maintenance of globalization. Terms such as petroculture, petromoderity or petroideology point to the ambiguous role of petrol as a resource, on the one hand, propelling the development of democratic societies and improving the quality of life, on the other, generating new forms of exploitation, inequality, violence and ecological collapse. Modern capitalism, based on the ideology of unlimited growth, takes the form of petrocapitalism, which means that the question of transition from fossil fuels to alternative means of energy production entails a serious deliberation on the future of capitalist societies and their inevitable transformation.
As a relatively new current of cultural critique, energy humanities resort to, for example, literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy or critical theory in order to look at the problem of energy in various contexts that often require interdisciplinary methodologies (as indicated by such notions as petroliterature, petropoetics, the aesthetics of resources, the epistemology of energy). Fuels and the energy they produce, more often than not, remain hidden from the public eye and constitute the cultural unconscious, historically manifesting only on the surface of political discourse in times of crisis. In contemporary culture, with the growing awareness of climate change and its consequences, such manifestations have the tendency to take dystopic or (post)apocalyptic forms in popular imaginaries.
Additionally, the metaphors and poetics of energy appear in various discourses and texts of culture which aim to depict the reality of societies in late capitalism, or to speculate about their possible future(s), talking about exhaustion, crisis, acceleration, entropy, sustainability and renewability, and thus shaping the imagery and rhetoric that influence the perception of energy in contemporary world.
In an attempt to approach critically the problems of fuels, energy, and cultures of energy, we invite submissions inspired by the following questions:
- energy in historical, philosophical, theoretical perspectives
- energy materialism(s)
- energy infrastructures
- resource aesthetics
- petrocolonialism and petroviolence
- petromodernity
- the cultures of extraction
- entropy
- post-fossil thought
- fuels in texts of culture
Articles, including all required metadata, should be submitted through the OJS system by 30 April 2021 in accordance with all the guidelines available in the “About” and “Submission” sections.