Infrastructures of Representation, Infrastructures of Extraction: Energy, Environment, and Literary Form in World Literatures and Cultures Event

Date:: 14 May 2024
Venue:: Avenue Campus, The University of Southampton

Event details

How might an infrastructural approach shed light on the ways in which literary and cultural forms mediate the lived realities, subjective fantasies, and affectively-charged investments in the industrial, technological and geopolitical dimensions of extraction? How does the emergence of new energy forms and energy regimes lead to the emergence of new literary forms, new cultural imaginaries, new modes of subjectivity, and new social relations? How can the discourses of energy and energy humanities shape new avenues of literary interpretation – particularly the representations of oil, gas, water, and other forms of energy in literary works from Africa, Asia and the Middle East?

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Jason Moore, Prof. Jeroen Warner, Pro. Jennifer Wenzel, Prof, Sheena Wilson, Prof. Stephen Morton, Dr Jeff Diamanti, Dr Dominic Davies, Dr Pieter Vermeulen

This conference invites the submission of abstracts and/or proposals for 20-minute talks that address any one or more of the following points:

How does literature navigate and critique the condition of the energy unconscious in which the effects are manifest and naturalized but the causes and remedies remain structurally occluded, repressed, or concealed?
How does literature navigate and critique the capitalist modes of energy extraction and production in which certain human bodies and nonhuman natures are disappeared?
How do literary forms create, mediate, or even manipulate the experience, perception and imagination of the public in their adopting and adapting to new forms of energy not only as an integral part of their form of life but also their bodily schema, and their social identity and their system of values?
How has the subject’s individual and social ontology been conditioned by infrastructures, energy forms, and extractivist modes of modernity?
How might a dialectical approach to energy and genre (1) identify the emergence and development of new literary forms, and the development of new narrative and dramatic devices, styles, and languages; and (2) cognitively map the various affects associated with energy extraction (including bad love, crude realism, cruel optimism, petro-mania, petro-melancholia, hopeful futurity, freedom, progress, autonomy, hysteria, addiction, etc.)?
How in their engagement with the questions of energy and environment genre works like infrastructure by distributing narrative attention, visibility, resources, actions, affects, and expectations as well as the relations between them?
How genre acts as the infrastructure of infrastructure, an underlying connective logic that shapes how infrastructures are encountered and perceived. In turn, infrastructures materialize generic expectations about the world?
How literary form, which aestheticizes contingency and fortune, shapes the way characters relate to various formal and informal infrastructures like the roads, the highways, various fossil-fuelled transportation means (including trains and planes), underbridges and abandoned buildings?
In what ways have literary texts naturalized the infrastructure of modernity? And in what ways have they invited readers to interrogate the use of infrastructur

Please submit abstracts and/or short proposals (300 words, with accompanying images—max. 3—as necessary) in conjunction with a short bio to [email protected] by 23/05/2024 . While work is welcome in any language, we ask that the presentations and abstracts are in English. Please include a short bio for each contributor. Selected contributors will be notified by 27/05/2024.

Whilst we primarily encourage in-person attendance and presentation, the conference will also be held in a hybrid mode for the benefit of the international audience.