04 - Reading for Energy and the Planet | with Jennifer Wenzel

00:00:00: The coloniality of nature means that we often tend to understand nature primarily as a natural resource.

00:00:08: That is something separate from humans, subject to human control and disposed for our use right?

00:00:18: Oil companies are among the most powerful and influential purveyors of the fossil field imagination.

00:00:25: Oil companies in the US, at least before the oil shock of the nineteen seventies all about telling consumers how there was oil in everything right?

00:00:36: So he has these amazing reproductions of magazine ads from I think the nineteen sixties that are vegetables And they say, did you know there's oil in your food?

00:01:30: Let me briefly introduce Jennifer before we get into the conversation.

00:01:34: Jennifer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and professor of Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies at Columbia

00:01:42: University.

00:01:43: Jennifer's an expert in ethnic and third world literatures post-colonial criticism And a relationship between publishing literature and energy.

00:01:53: In this episode We will discuss how reading fiction can shape environmental awareness Jennifer's role in helping create the energy humanities, and ways to think about and beyond fossil fuel dependence.

00:02:06: This episode will be a great one for everyone who wants to deep dive into a leading scholar's thoughts on relationship between energy.

00:02:20: You're in so many ways the perfect guest for this podcast because you've recently

00:02:23: written

00:02:24: a beautiful book called The Disposition of Nature, Environmental Crisis and World Literature.

00:02:29: that asks basically the same question we are trying to answer with this series which is related

00:02:35: how

00:02:35: people can view environment through literary form or cultural ideas.

00:02:42: I'm going to quote here now.

00:02:43: then give back your questions Reading for the planet?

00:02:49: How nonsensical is it to think that reading might help save the earth?

00:02:53: or literature can address many environmental challenges confronting today.

00:02:58: And you keep going, things like climate change, fossil fuel dependence and resource depletion are not merely technological economic or political problems but also narrative problem of imagination.

00:03:13: So maybe start by answering your own question that is, how can reading be part of an environmentalist practice?

00:03:19: Well thank you so much for having me and thanks for the kind words about this book.

00:03:23: And um... Thank you for throwing my question back to me!

00:03:28: I'll give a bit of your backstory on where it came from in this book which i worked on very long time For almost all the whole time when i've been working with it And so the current title was a last-minute change requested by my editor.

00:03:49: To be completely frank, when I sat down to write The Introduction near the end of the process... ...I didn't know how start the introduction and it's almost like a placeholder!

00:04:00: To ask myself for the title Reading For The Planet really?

00:04:05: So i ended up keeping that and the introduction is called reading for the planet.

00:04:10: And so, you know the question about whether reading can be part of an environmentalist praxis.

00:04:17: I would say that in the book.

00:04:18: That i say yes but In a complicated way.

00:04:21: and what?

00:04:22: I mean by.

00:04:22: That is I think very often Not only humanities scholars But our students and other folks believe Reading is a form of action, right?

00:04:34: That reading about something Is either the same as or kind of creates a path for doing Something.

00:04:42: Yes About the environment and I want to complicate that kind of easy equation Right between between reading and doing.

00:04:50: And what i am more interested in The book More interested In in the Book.

00:04:59: Literature is doing things to us and with us all the time, whether we realize it or not.

00:05:05: And so sure reading can be part of a way of thinking in different ways about nature then possibly acting in different.

00:05:26: many of the ideas and assumptions that we have about nature come without our realizing it from reading literature, from narratives in images.

00:05:37: And so I think the way that i see uh reading for The Planet as a kind of environmentalist practice is first of all becoming cognizant or conscious of that work that literature does all the time right?

00:05:50: That stories that um literature tells us I suggest in the book, perhaps as complicit... ...in environmental injustice and environmental harm.

00:06:04: As they are a path toward a better future.

00:06:07: so it's very complicated yes!

00:06:12: And not necessarily yeah.

00:06:13: No that is great answer.

00:06:14: also wanted to raise some more questions because when i think about reading for the planet you would at first thought assume then The novel, for example has to be about the environment in an explicit way.

00:06:29: Like depicting landscapes and so on but... ...the way you also frame it doesn't sound like that has to do with only thing.

00:06:35: if its about global issues and comprehending complex views of the environment.

00:06:43: It does not have just nature writing In a sense.

00:06:47: Do you have genres?

00:06:49: That you teach outside of nature writing problem or this theme?

00:06:55: Yeah, I would say...I teach actually very little nature writing.

00:06:59: I figured

00:07:02: that much!

00:07:03: Very early in my career when the first time i was asked to keynote a conference and it I didn't love nature enough for the group.

00:07:20: And of course, you know...I loved nature but that's maybe a love it in complicated way right?

00:07:27: Maybe also more profound

00:07:28: ways.

00:07:28: Yeah so one genre that worries me is that i teach some up again try to be critical is the kind of eco-apocalypse.

00:07:44: And I think we'll only get more and more of those as time goes on, but what it was saying about literature being complicit in telling us stories that we don't even realize suggesting a trajectory that moves away from, let's say the kind of life most people would want to live.

00:08:24: And so I wanna be cognizant on the tendency toward eco-apocalypse or dystopia and think about choices authors are making in choosing this genre.

00:08:35: And every time I have this kind of conversation, the parts per million of CO₂ in that atmosphere ticks a little bit higher.

00:08:46: That climate clock ticks closer to...I don't know what?

00:08:51: So it becomes more difficult when we talk about these things and say let's not only have dystopian stories bad.

00:09:06: But I think also to recognize that dystopia is a choice.

00:09:13: and there are other ways of telling stories, I taught the course for this past year in climate fictions which included examples the ways that they would tell stories about what it means to live on and create a new life in the wake of a radically changed climate.

00:09:43: One thing I noticed about those narratives is, But something that also happens in addition to rebuilding society is the pirates show up.

00:10:07: In what senses?

00:10:09: Helping us move on!

00:10:15: created their own society, which entails taking stuff from other societies.

00:10:23: And so on the one hand there's this kind of hopeful gesture of recreating communities sometimes recreating norms if not rules for living together.

00:10:32: and then the pirates are that anti-social force that interrupts those new communities.

00:10:42: The climate has changed, but how do you live after the pirates have showed up?

00:10:48: We have pirates in our own day.

00:10:49: So I guess we're kind of used to that.

00:10:51: and one more thing i would say about the title.

00:10:56: reading for the planet is that... You know..I hear that title a number ways In terms of Planet as equating to Earth or Climate or Nature the environmentalist part, but also reading for The Planet in terms of thinking about how any given text gestures toward a broader context.

00:11:22: So thinking about even a text that's quite locally situated can help us think at broader scales.

00:11:30: Yeah and we'll get to the problem with scales in just a moment.

00:11:35: But first We wanted You know, these approaches to literary studies in a sense.

00:11:40: To think about literature as telling us something about the environment and maybe also about a certain kind of future how we can imagine society In the future.

00:11:49: These are questions that I'm not always asked in Literary Studies or dehumanities?

00:11:55: I guess in a broader sense.

00:11:57: So when did you start becoming

00:11:58: interested in

00:11:59: the environment

00:12:00: as an academic

00:12:00: subject And did you always think that would be a possible avenue to go?

00:12:05: Well, I can say that my very first poem which was very very bad.

00:12:09: I wrote when I was ten years old...I am not a poet!

00:12:15: It was one i had first moved from Pennsylvania in the US to Texas Which is much more car-driven place.

00:12:22: so it's a poem That expressed my horror about their drive through.

00:12:26: but don't even know if you have this go without getting out of your car to get something.

00:12:33: And I would

00:12:33: say it's not as prominent here, okay?

00:12:35: Also non-as prominent in Pennsylvania where I was born.

00:12:38: so iIwas just kind of horrified and up in arms about this.

00:12:42: um So there is a way saying that In some ways have been thinking about these issues for a long time.

00:12:48: But I Would Say More Directly That My dissertation my PhD was written about, it was the South African Nullist Jayme Kutziya and a Bengali writer-activist Mahashwara Devi which is maybe an unlikely pairing but I was interested in how they represented in their fiction and nonfiction racialized contests over land.

00:13:14: So basically the intersection between nature.

00:13:19: So I had a chapter on farms, a chapter for forests.

00:13:24: Had an imaginary chapter that remains imaginary on dams.

00:13:31: but i was writing this in the mid-nineties and ecocriticism wasn't really on the horizon.

00:13:40: so it's more kind of a marxian production of nature, Raymond Williams Edward Said in terms of questions about geography and the ways which power and space interact.

00:13:53: And I would say that so i finished it at late nineties.

00:13:58: then very early two thousands was part.

00:14:11: think about the rise of ecocriticism in the nineties.

00:14:14: and I would say that this is a way of explaining like why i didn't think of my dissertation as eco-critical because there was a kind of emergence of eco criticism, but it's very much you know.

00:14:39: in England.

00:14:40: And so I was part of, in the early two thousands that kind of post-colonial ecocriticism or the Poco ecocorrective to that about nature and empire together.

00:14:56: And so, you know I guess for a long time i've been interested in what we would now call the coloniality of nature right?

00:15:04: The way that nature was both in material and epistemological terms a terrain of colonial conquest...and one can say..

00:15:14: Could she maybe give an example?

00:15:17: Oh man.

00:15:20: You're asking

00:15:20: me?

00:15:20: For someone listening, it's not like a post-colonialist.

00:15:23: Right to go from the very abstract... Yeah Very concrete I think.

00:15:29: maybe this is going to remain abstract but It becomes i think more concrete.

00:15:37: One aspect of the coloniality Of nature by which I mean The ways in which Nature remains in some ways understood through habits of mind that emerged with European imperialism, right?

00:15:56: And I would say one really fundamental example of the continuing ways that European Imperialism and its habits-of-mind shape nature is the idea.

00:16:18: The coloniality of nature means that, and I'm just going to use we as a kind of shorthand.

00:16:27: We often tend to understand nature primarily has a natural resource—that is something separate from humans that is subject to human control and that is disposed for our use, as opposed to seeing nature in some other way.

00:16:47: So even though I've been thinking about this very good long time it's difficult to come up with another phrase than natural resources right?

00:16:56: And so the resource idea is anthropocentric, understands nature as oriented toward humans.

00:17:08: And I think that we can understand the coloniality of nature, I'm using so many Latin words.

00:17:21: The onset of idea as having gone hand-in-hand with European conquest and exploration in terms of seeing not only Europe but the planet and mostly European use.

00:17:42: Yeah, that's Sex Ways on Sex Waze has very beautifully into the next topic which is something I'm excited about because i am doing my PhD in the energy humanities.

00:17:52: you are actually one of the founding voices

00:17:55: in the

00:17:55: Energy Humanities.

00:17:56: You've published an article in two thousand six That was foundational for The Field.

00:18:03: And thats another thing another connection like the environmental literature part, but maybe even more exotic in a way.

00:18:11: How did you start thinking or I guess first to say the energy humanity sort of explored your relationship between energy and culture?

00:18:19: But how did you started thinking about this relationship and was there anything available for at that time?

00:18:24: Yeah thanks with his question!

00:18:28: I might say that as you suggest, um...I've been doing energy humanities not only since it wasn't cool but before it existed.

00:18:36: Right?

00:18:36: Um and that is to say- I mean i understand the emergence of energy humanities in terms of that term uh has having come from a news letter piece written by Amra Zeman and Dominic Boyer.

00:18:57: But what happened was that in the early two thousands, I was teaching a course on The West African Novel In English.

00:19:05: And so it's reading and number of Nigerian texts... ...and there were three texts among them talked about palm products petroleum and literary publishing basically as commodities for export.

00:19:20: Each text talks at least to those things together kind of triangulated.

00:19:26: And so I got really interested in particular about the relationship between petroleum, and Nigeria exported its first barrel of oil two years before Nigerian independence in nineteen sixty.

00:19:42: and literary publishing.

00:19:45: And there was also, you know it's certainly not the case that Chino Achebe was the first Nigerian novelist but he also published Things Fall Apart which kind of started a boom in Nigerian novels at the same time.

00:20:01: So as I said i got really interested how these three texts thought.

00:20:05: between those three commodities This would have been around two thousand three.

00:20:15: That there was nothing in Anglophone literary studies really to help me think about these things.

00:20:22: now, There are a few exceptions and I would say that particularly we're talking about the Nigerian context.

00:20:28: The execution of Kensar Owiwa the activist In nineteen ninety five certainly spurred A lot Of writing about the Niger Delta and his struggle, he was a poet also writer for TV but there wasn't really anything that would kind of point me toward method or how to think these things.

00:20:51: And so it happened upon discipline political ecology which is closely connected with geography.

00:21:00: What was interesting to me about political ecology is that it's about conflicts over natural resources.

00:21:06: That word again, right?

00:21:07: And It's about material and economic and social conflicts of our natural resources.

00:21:14: but the thing that was so interesting To Me Was that Political Ecology had space for Conflicts in the realm Of The Imagination Right.

00:21:22: So there was For me as a literary critic I was like i have something of that petro-magic realism article toward a political ecology of Nigerian literature.

00:21:36: And in terms of where I've ended up since then, so let me back up... So when i got interested in these questions I was interested in literature and oil in the Niger Delta right?

00:21:53: That's kind of it!

00:21:56: It felt like a long time at the time, but it wasn't so long now.

00:22:05: In two thousand twelve I got connected with Petroculture's research group which is out of the University of Alberta in Edmonton and they had their first petrocultures conference.

00:22:17: And there i met people who have become very close friends and colleagues of mine Who were also working one way or another on literature history, anthropology cultural studies also thinking about oil.

00:22:37: And so my kind of narrow interest from literature, oil petroleum palm products publishing in the Niger Delta grew into a broader what a number of petro critics call Petromanternity, right?

00:22:53: The kind shape the world that many us inhabit has been shaped by cheap and easy access to fossil fuels.

00:23:04: And I would say since my interest in literature oil grew interested in petrocultures and petromanternity... ...I think another thing maybe in the past eight years or so is thinking beyond what one critic calls Petromaiopia, right?

00:23:30: Only thinking about oil even though that's where my initial interest and I think still most of my interests lies.

00:23:36: I'm also good to you.

00:23:37: Yeah,

00:23:38: Petromaopia alright!

00:23:40: So thinking about energy more broadly... And then another thing I think has really changed is that when i first started out, um...I think the questions of energy transition or transformation and climate were.

00:23:59: you know they were there but not at the heart of my concerns.

00:24:04: But that's kind of at the center, what I'm thinking about.

00:24:13: Or it is a close horizon.

00:24:16: when you think about so... I've done a lot collective work with a shifting group called After Oil and we thought together in very concentrated ways on what comes after oil right?

00:24:36: use our smarts as energy humanists to try and imagine, step closer into the world after oil.

00:24:43: That's probably a whole lot more answer than

00:24:47: that you would!

00:24:48: It is an open question.

00:24:50: Maybe to hit you with another big question... A question I've actually written about a bunch of times was how do we read for energy?

00:25:00: Because there are prevailing senses where we're surrounded by petrol.

00:25:05: modernity manifests in so many things, cars cosmetics plastics.

00:25:10: But and this is sort of the argument made many times I said This makes it difficult for us to read four energy because these things are So common and generic can taken for granted that they're not really the object Of thought or fiction?

00:25:23: In that sense

00:25:24: Yeah, so um Like i guess what i would say.

00:25:29: you know i wrote long ago that oil specifically is everywhere and nowhere.

00:25:40: It's not so much invisible as unseen, right?

00:25:44: So what the... Not so much visible as unseen means if we you know my colleague Graham McDonald says If We Care to Look Right!

00:25:54: If we care to look for it then Thenwecanstarttoseeit.

00:25:58: Andso you know, this kind of mode thinking about how to read oil comes out at that same moment when I went the first Petrocultures conference in two thousand twelve.

00:26:10: It's also the first time i taught a course on literature and oil an undergrad class.

00:26:14: You know, I don't think it was the first class anywhere on Literature and Oil but iIwas pretty sure that's my students' First Class On Literature & Oil.

00:26:27: How do I talk to undergraduates about this?

00:26:32: And so... I just happened upon this line from Edward Said's introduction into Orientalism.

00:26:40: That is really transformative for me!

00:26:45: So what Said is doing in the introduction to Orientalism, he's quoting from this passage about a passage from Antonio Gramsci.

00:26:57: How a scholar or thinker launches a project of inquiry and Gramscy says that you know... The historical process has sedimented in us an infinity of traces, right?

00:27:15: That means that Petra modernity for example has sedimented and infinity of traces in me.

00:27:23: That shape where I am as a scholar to begin to ask

00:27:25: questions.".

00:27:27: And Said says yeah this part of Gramsci is often translated.

00:27:32: what is less translated than Gramscy goes on.

00:27:36: the first step therefore sorry... An Infinity Of Traces Without Leaving An Inventory Right?

00:27:42: So I can't see the list of things, those lists of traces.

00:27:46: So Said says what translation doesn't say is that Gramsci goes on to say so.

00:27:51: The first step therefore it's to compile an inventory right.

00:27:55: and so That idea of compiling in inventory Of the ways that history has shaped me or my students For me as very connected To this question of how to read for oil the traces of that historical process in me, and then sitting in a classroom with my students.

00:28:15: And thinking about how there are traces of oil in the very classroom where we sit right?

00:28:22: So on the first day of class.

00:28:24: reading for Oil is not about reading literature it's about reading The Classroom Right!

00:28:29: I start you know asking Students How Oil Is Flowing Through The Room.

00:28:35: so they talk.

00:28:38: I have to push them a little bit.

00:28:39: So, you know it's not on this carpet right?

00:28:42: But how can we see oil or other forms of energy in the room?

00:28:46: so they talk about like literally their electricity which is not from oil.

00:28:51: They talked about car, bus etc.

00:29:01: They talk about the manufacture of other items in the room.

00:29:05: they talked about food and cosmetics petrochemicals.

00:29:12: It often takes a little bit of time, but I make sure the exercise is not over until they say money.

00:29:23: And actually was asked to teach a sample class this past spring.

00:29:29: that was for students admitted students who haven't yet started and their parents.

00:29:36: Oh, yeah.

00:29:37: And their parents.

00:29:38: and so I did a version of that reading for oil in the classroom.

00:29:42: how'd it go?

00:29:43: It was so interesting partly because you know the interactive part.

00:29:49: The parents were.

00:29:51: they wanted to raise their hands and participate.

00:29:59: You know, the tuition money was like top of mind.

00:30:04: Right?

00:30:04: And it was the parents whose participation in an economy that depends on fossil fuels.

00:30:10: they were sitting right there and we talked about money.

00:30:13: In terms of literature you know one might say that an alternative kind of history of energy humanities might be dated back to Amitav Kosh the novelist who I think people might know from his two thousand fifteen book The Great Derangement, which is about a lack of climate change fiction.

00:30:39: And there are some places where I agree with Kosh About the Imports Of The Imagination but Some Places Where I Disagree.

00:30:46: But i'm bringing that That text up because what's interesting to me Is that kosh makes A very similar argument to the argument that he made in nineteen ninety two and an essay called Petra fiction where you said, um You know Our society runs on oil.

00:31:07: And yeah there is not.

00:31:09: Where's The Great Oil novel?

00:31:10: So He pointed toward it To a lack of literature about oil.

00:31:17: I see the structure Of his argument In those Two texts About A Lack of Oil novels and a lack of climate change.

00:31:25: literature as being, the structure is the same.

00:31:29: Right?

00:31:29: And I think one of the places where I differ from him is that oil is everywhere in nowhere and literature has been life right.

00:31:38: so it's also about thinking the presence and indispensability of energy, whether in the, you know, eighteenth century, nineteenth-century or in the twentieth century.

00:32:02: And so as you suggested earlier these aren't questions that necessarily get asked all oil, and reading for climate.

00:32:18: For that matter as in part noticing yeah sure absences and silences but also noticing what's there And we just haven't paid attention to.

00:32:32: So it's about thinking About questions of infrastructure Of heat light motion In the ways which they shape daily lives The extent energy scarcity or surplus registers as a concern in the text.

00:32:52: And I suppose, this may be heresy but it's less important to me that students and other folk learn to read literature for oil modern life, including literature.

00:33:21: Yes great you have a new book coming out.

00:33:26: kind of

00:33:27: it is also about the question.

00:33:29: I mean It's called how and why to read for energy.

00:33:32: Would you mind telling us a bit?

00:33:34: About your new book?

00:33:35: Yeah So How And Why To Read For Energy Is The Subtitle.

00:33:40: When I first started thinking about this book, i was calling it The Fossil Fueled Imagination A How and Why to Read for Energy.

00:33:47: And more recently I've started thinking of that as beyond the fossil fueled imagination.

00:33:52: um...and my joke about this is hope and fear that by the time I actually finish this book, fossil fuels will be but a memory.

00:34:09: Right?

00:34:10: And so... Well

00:34:11: i would like to read the book sooner!

00:34:13: I'd like to finish it a bit soon.

00:34:16: yeah then I mean to be quite serious.

00:34:18: you know uh-I call that A Hope & Fear and I lead with The Hope.

00:34:22: because um I quoted Graham McDonald, my colleague already and I'll say something else.

00:34:29: he said that i think was really right.

00:34:32: That our goal as petro critics or energy humanities scholars shouldn't be to found organizations and create a journal.

00:34:43: it should put ourselves out of business like petrocritics specifically.

00:34:48: so you know if fossil fuels were eclipsed by the time

00:34:54: Right?

00:34:54: Then we can move beyond Petromaiopia.

00:34:56: Beyond Petromaopia, right!

00:34:59: But yeah I mean what i thought was doing when started this book.

00:35:06: it simply to collect a number of small pieces that had written during the time writing The Disposition Of Nature which is more about environmental humanities writ large than about energy humanities.

00:35:24: I mean, there's one chapter in Disposition of Nature or Bath and Nigel Delta.

00:35:29: So while was writing that book?

00:35:30: iIwas on the side also doing this Energy Humanities work.

00:35:33: And so I thought you know, I'll just do a quick short book where all just package All those essays together.

00:35:39: get it out.

00:35:40: You would have read It already!

00:35:42: As I've said uh...i am A slow writer Of books.

00:35:47: That is not what Im Doing.

00:35:49: So, so yeah it's a book that nonetheless kind of tries to think about... Excuse me.

00:36:03: A lot of the things I've talked about already and that is how cultural imagining writ large in literature and beyond literature shape understandings.

00:36:16: I think it's also about, you know what i mean by the fossil-fueled imagination is to be most concrete.

00:36:28: This is something that often talk with my students when I wake up in the morning.

00:36:37: What are my expectations for?

00:36:47: How is that kind of anticipation imagination shaped by the expectation?

00:36:54: Of, um.

00:36:55: Of cheap and easy energy or the awareness uh...of the lack of-of cheap an easy energy?

00:37:01: Uh this a bit mundane but I'm living in London This fall And Energy's Easy But It' Not Cheap.

00:37:11: There's A Little Meter That Tells Me Every Day

00:37:14: How Much Moving Beyond Petroleum

00:37:16: how much energy I'm using.

00:37:18: And so, you know that's a mundane version of the fossil-fueled imagination but certainly for most of them.

00:37:27: into late twentieth century people who inhabit energy abundance The imagination was about freedom and progress speed pleasure we might say in historicizing the fossil-field imagination and recognizing that it isn't something just kind of dropped from heaven, but was created by particular actors.

00:37:57: One thing I'm interested is how oil companies are among the most powerful and influential purveyors that oil companies in the

00:38:16: U.S.,

00:38:16: at least before the oil shock of the nineteen seventies, were in their marketing departments.

00:38:22: all about telling consumers how there was oil and everything right?

00:38:28: So he has these amazing reproductions of magazine ads from I think the nineteen sixties And they say, did you know there's oil in your food?

00:38:46: The kind of valence or the expectation I think that the oil companies are expecting.

00:38:51: In the nineteen sixties oh!

00:38:52: There is oil on my food it's helping food grow.

00:38:57: and so at least before the price of oil quadrupled overnight We're all about telling consumers how indispensable oil was in their daily lives and the things that it made possible.

00:39:17: That's kind of a driving force for the book, I hope i haven't finished.

00:39:28: So there will be a chapter on oil companies?

00:39:30: Well...I can say there is a chapter about oil companies per se.

00:39:33: but So there is a bit, I think that you may have heard this about the American painter Alexandra Hogue in early twentieth century who if folks know him it's probably as he was known in the nineteen thirties.

00:39:59: But at the same time that he was doing paintings about The Dust Bowl in, uh... In the

00:40:05: U.S.,

00:40:05: in the nineteen thirties He took a commission for Gulf oil and went out to West Texas To visit their oil fields there.

00:40:14: And it's Maybe it was maybe a surprise to Hogue, but is definitely surprised me.

00:40:21: To see the contrast between his extreme criticism of the role of technology and human error in having created The Dust Bowl which just say briefly what that was if folks don't know process of erosion in the Great Plains Of The

00:40:41: U.S.,

00:40:42: where the topsoil just kind of blew away and these enormous dust storms that was caused partly by drought, partly by bad farming practices etc... So Hogue's documented in some ways the horrors at time.

00:40:58: so he was probably- And I was definitely surprised to discover that Hogue thought that oil extraction is West Texas at Gulf oil fields was amazing and thought that it complemented nature.

00:41:12: And so, that's one example of Gulf Oil.

00:41:16: this is a feature that ran in the magazine Fortune in nineteen thirty-seven.

00:41:23: So That's One Example Of Hogue A Painter Helping To Create The Fossil Field Imagination In The Prewar Era On behalf Of Gulf Oil.

00:41:36: basically, so there's one example for you.

00:41:40: Yeah that's a great example.

00:41:42: I remember the pictures a bit.

00:41:44: yeah it was strange to see the oil tanks in sort of a pastoral beautiful rural integrated into the countryside setting

00:41:52: right?

00:41:52: You can't tell the oil tank from the limestone hills.

00:41:56: they just kind of resemble each other.

00:41:58: really fascinating Jennifer.

00:42:00: final question You're here in Constance for a conference called Europe after Decolonization.

00:42:07: And as you mentioned, your...

00:42:08: ...you've been trained

00:42:09: as a post-colonial critic and your dissertation was also about or in that subject area.

00:42:15: To bring this back to our topic of the environment You write in your book The Disposition Of Nature About Scale being in a certain place, but then also thinking about the planets and larger scales.

00:42:30: And you call this practice reading from near to there?

00:42:33: I just wanted to ask you to explain this practice a bit... ...and to explain where do see the relationship between ideas of environment on sort-of global and often uneven flow of ideas and people.

00:42:47: Yeah, so there are a number of ways I could come at that.

00:42:50: One to go back to the Niger Delta example when I came up with this idea of petro-magic realism putting together the idea of Petro magic and how oil seems to create wealth without work in the literary mode of magical realism.

00:43:06: And um...I made an argument regarding literature in Nigeria.

00:43:15: that's the near part of reading from near to there and by that I mean in that article, i'm really interested in local traditions of writing and other verbal arts right?

00:43:32: And how uh...the experience of petro-modernity in Nigeria and then Niger Delta kind of intersects those literary traditions intersect with relations on the ground caused by oil companies, or created by oil company and government.

00:43:50: And so I understood that work was doing as hyper-local right?

00:43:55: So i don't see that petro magic realism necessarily tells us anything about oil in other places.

00:44:02: but...I would also say with regard to my Why does this matter?

00:44:14: It matters for sure to people in the Niger Delta.

00:44:18: But I also, you know another phrase In addition to reading from near-to there that i might use is To follow.

00:44:27: So how to think between scales?

00:44:29: How do follow the pipeline from the Niger Delta, too for example of The United States.

00:44:33: How to understand the relationship between the extraction of oil in the Niger delta and what it means to inhabit fossil fuel life In the united states?

00:44:45: at that point I was doing this work.

00:44:46: i think twenty percent Of u.s Oil came From the Niger data.

00:44:50: And yeah It's something about What About which US citizens were largely unaware.

00:44:57: So the reason this is important, I think.

00:45:03: Yeah and i'm trying to keep that post-colonial question on the horizon as well right?

00:45:07: One one reason that This Is Important I Think is That um...I don't..i am not sure that The Sorry!

00:45:25: Im thinking about my hotel room this morning and the choices that I make to save the planet, right?

00:45:34: But i actually think that...that the planet is too big for people to think they can do anything about.

00:45:41: Right?

00:45:41: And so that's..I think the importance of the near-to-think from the small scale even the scale of the individual human body the city or nation state, region and planet.

00:46:01: Understand that I do inhabit a planet but also a body in any number of scales between.

00:46:19: the post-colonial framework, although I know it is attached.

00:46:24: If you want to redirect or...

00:46:28: The question basically was meant a bit go into direction of ... You know that?

00:46:49: Also, not just with planetaries in terms of the planet but also people who inhabit the planet far away and there's a certain kind of exchange.

00:47:00: And that is how I thought maybe the post-colonial might fit in?

00:47:05: Yes!

00:47:13: whom I've been reading since before i was a postcolonialist.I learned how to be a Postcolonials apart from Mary-Louise Pratt and she wrote this book in the early nineties called Imperial Eyes.

00:47:24: that was about, subtitle is Travel Writing & Transculturation And How European Travel Writing Basically you know we might say In twenty first century language kind of established The Coloniality Of How We Think About The World.

00:47:40: So in That Early Book She talks about planetary consciousness.

00:47:45: And when she writes Planetary Consciousness in nineteen ninety two, she means something very different than what we've been talking about right?

00:47:52: She talks About how European travel writing helped to create a sense of planetary consciousness by which she meant Europeans awareness Of themselves as connected To a prod you know kind of project of expansion beyond themselves.

00:48:14: So in other words, planetary consciousness is very much a kind of Eurocentric project.

00:48:20: and she just in the past few years published book called Planetary Longings.

00:48:26: And She uses the word planetary in that Book In A Very Different Way Which Is Planetary longings are not a Eurocentric Imperial Project.

00:48:38: Rather, it's about her attention to how people in communities around the world—her main focus is on Latin America are doing work of imagining community and local communities.

00:48:55: How that connects to concerns of environment climate but also human flourishing across.

00:49:07: And she has a real knack, her real interest I think in what we might have as vernacular.

00:49:15: planetarity, right?

00:49:16: And that book opens with an account of going to a restaurant in Peru where there's very funny poster on the wall.

00:49:26: She takes this not some fancy novel as an example of imagining community both at local and planetary scale.

00:49:35: so I'm trying to trace from Pratt's Planetary Consciousness as a Eurocentric project planetary longings as we might say a project that probably has been going on across the majority, but she's looking at it very specifically in terms of building livable futures for all kinds of humans in climate change world.

00:50:06: Yeah!

00:50:07: That is Also to end the podcast, Jennifer is now on her way to a talk that she's giving here at Constance.

00:50:13: What an honor it has been for me to speak with her today and how gracious of her to make the time.

00:50:20: Jennifer has been a role model of mine for quite some time now so I'm very happy.