Abstract
Situated within debates of world literature, petrocultures, and the blue humanities, this article provides a methodological approach to interpreting genre, energy forms, and world-literature. This relies on Dominic Boyer’s concept of ‘energopolitics’ (adapted from Foucault’s biopolitics), which considers the codependence of political power, electricity, fuel and energy infrastructure. Echoing Fredric Jameson (1981) and Patricia Yaeger (2011), the article argues that looking for a text’s ‘energopolitical unconscious’ is a means of discerning the way energopolitics and energy are encoded in world-literary plot, form, and genre. Then, it turns to a comparative reading of two novels, Carlos Fuentes’s The Hydra Head (1978) and Ian Rankin’s Black & Blue (1997), to argue that such novels provide an understanding of relationships between world-literary genre, forms of energy, and the world-oceanic regime of the offshore. The offshore is a juridical-spatial regime that circumvents nation-state regulation through extraterritorial ownership practices. It is a political and infrastructural power over the oceanic flows of capital and energy, to produce a spatial environment that exceeds the juridical boundaries of nation-states. Thus, if the world-ocean is the space upon which fossil capital depends for its realisation, the offshore is the legal form of fossil capital in the world-ocean. Finally, the article argues that noir mysteries are the genre of the offshore, as it is a genre particularly capable of indexing its social tensions. Noir’s settings and atmospheres are intimately connected with petromodernity’s infrastructure: hotels, highways, flickering streetlights and eerie hinterlands, ports and warehouses; the mystery is an excellent formal device, providing both narratorial motivation and a code for traversing imagined territories and detecting their secrets. At the same time, noir’s generic investment in investigations of legality and power—its ‘legal grammar’—makes it a useful stage through which to pursue questions of sovereignty, ocean-space, territory, and juridical forms.
Highlights
Situated within debates of world literature, petrocultures, and the blue humanities, this article provides a methodological approach to interpreting genre, energy forms, and world-literature
‘energopolitics’, which considers the codependence of political power, electricity, fuel and energy infrastructure (Boyer 2019)
Echoing Fredric Jameson (1981) and Patricia Yaeger (2011), I suggest that looking for a text’s ‘energopolitical unconscious’ is a means of discerning the way energopolitics and energy are encoded in world-literary plot, form, and genre
Summary
Let’s begin with a mystery, set in some of the world’s largest ports: “A ship is mysteriously renamed. These two novels track patterns of intrigue in offshore oil boom towns, Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz, Mexico, and Aberdeen, Scotland ( the plots encompass a much wider social terrain) These two novels especially are exemplary demonstrations of the peculiar difficulties that the offshore poses to representation, and of the efficacy of mysteries as a formal device to encode and index political and infrastructural power. We might say that a text’s semantic horizons are: a response to a situation of political and infrastructural power subtended by energy resources; the way control over energy resources maintains the world-system’s unequal division of labour; and the uneven coexistence of forms of energopolitics in the world-system Informing this approach is the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) theorization of ‘world-literature’ (the other half of this special issue’s focus), which has sought to reformulate literary comparativism through the perspective of world-systems analysis (for an introduction to world-systems analysis see Wallerstein 2004). It is a formal response to an infrastructural situation, to which I turn in greater detail
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
