Facting fiction: Revolution, the United Nations, and cultural politics of electricity

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the summer of 2013, the United Nations and NBC began a season-long collaborative campaign involving the primetime television series Revolution (2012–2014), a show about the global loss of electricity, to promote the former’s energy resource campaigns. The two entities collaboratively produced various texts and events encouraging audiences to learn more about United Nations energy initiatives and how people throughout the world lack consistent access to electricity. This essay offers a close, rhetorical reading of the collaboration’s paratexts, examining stated responses from actors, creators, interviewers, and panel participants within this content. In particular, I argue that contact between the paratexts and the “formative” text (that of the show’s narrative) can encourage viewers to think about electricity from the perspective of their own material practices, dependencies, and fears over losing the technological world. I examine how these invested viewers interpreted the United Nations’ efforts through such commitments. Naming a fictive world, and its feared loss, as metonymic of energy politics illustrates how meaning, emotion, and texts circulate, while also implicating the use of celebrity platforms for sociopolitical issues such as energy access.