How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another—from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever comes next—transformed culture and society? What are the implications of uneven access to energy in the past, present, and future? Which concepts and theories clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.
Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new.
Keywords in this volume include: Aboriginal, Accumulation, Addiction, Affect, America, Animal, Anthropocene, Architecture, Arctic, Automobile, Boom, Canada, Catastrophe, Change, Charcoal, China, Coal, Community, Corporation, Crisis, Dams, Demand, Detritus, Disaster, Ecology, Electricity, Embodiment, Ethics, Evolution, Exhaust, Fallout, Fiction, Fracking, Future, Gender, Green, Grids, Guilt, Identity, Image, Infrastructure, Innervation, Kerosene, Lebenskraft, Limits, Media, Metabolism, Middle East, Nature, Necessity, Networks, Nigeria, Nuclear, Petroviolence, Photography, Pipelines, Plastics, Renewable, Resilience, Risk, Roads, Rubber, Rural, Russia, Servers, Shame, Solar, Spill, Spiritual, Statistics, Surveillance, Sustainability, Tallow, Texas, Textiles, Utopia, Venezuela, Whaling, Wood, Work
For a full list of keywords in and contributors to this volume, please go to: http://ow.ly/4mZZxV

Imre Szeman holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and is the cofounder of the Petrocultures Research Group. He is the coauthor of After Oil and the coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Imre Szeman's profile page

Jennifer Wenzel is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009). With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she coedited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017).

Jennifer Wenzel's profile page

Patricia Yaeger was Henry Simmons Frieze Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

Patricia Yaeger's profile page

The compendium fuels the reader’s desire to consider and reconsider the ways in which we conceptualize the role of energy production and consumption in our work as much as our daily routines, and will likely prove an insightful and intellectually stimulating resource for scholars working in the area of energy and environment, regardless of discipline.---Matthew Heinz, Topia

Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, is perhaps the most generative and forward-looking collection in the first wave of energy humanities scholarship. Its wide and imaginative scope casts the field far beyond its origin in petroleum, with entries on such keywords as "tallow," "plastiglomerate," "off-grid," "superhero comics," and "shame." Working with very specific examples drawn from across multiple scales, energy sources, genres, and affects is a good way to ground energy, which is all too often reduced to a gauzy abstraction.

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“This is a bold, ambitious, and thought-provoking collection. Fueling Culture presents multiple ports of embarkation, geopolitical sites, archives, substances, genres, and methodologies for making sense of how deeply energy and culture are intermeshed.”---—Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington