Issue 6.3

Brent Ryan Bellamy is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He works on U.S. culture, science fiction, and the energy humanities. He is co-editor, with Jeff Diamanti, of the collection, Marxism and Energy, forthcoming from MCMPrime Press.
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Soon after I arrived at Columbia University last fall, I was asked whether I would like to be nominated for a sustainability award sponsored by the Resnick Institute at CalTech. In 250 words or less, I had to describe my invention, including the potential market for it and whether it could be scaled up.
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This essay grows out of a roundtable meant to assist the development of the so-called Energy Humanities. Each participant was asked to contribute a generative question. Mine was the question that now begins every conversation in the Humanities, that of scale.
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Not surprisingly, to think energy is always to address constitutive limits—the bars that ground and complicate any materialist understanding of the faintly oxymoronic term “Energy Humanities.” For efficiency—and after all, the exploitation of energy resources is about efficient resistance to anthropocentric atrophy—I will distill this response to four points about the local, the global, the institutional, and the theoretical.
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Energy Humanities is an emerging field of research that examines the way energy systems have shaped cultural, political, and economic formations through history. One of its defining characteristics, according to Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, is that Energy Humanities emphasizes the necessary contribution of the arts in reimagining areas of study traditionally thought to be under the purview of the sciences (40).
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Speaking in December 2014 to the UN convention on climate change in Lima, India’s environment minister insisted with stark clarity that “The world must accept that India’s per capita carbon emissions will need to rise rapidly if it is to eliminate poverty” (Lawrence and Wilkes).
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Energy Humanities excite thought, innervate methodology, and occasion new research. In one jolt the proposition that humanities researchers, literary scholars among them, address history from the standpoint of energy fuses against accusations of irrelevance that humanities departments face.
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N.B.: As the facilitator of this MLA session, I was mindful of the politics of a transnational settler academic event occupying space in Vancouver. With those considerations in mind, I began by acknowledging that this conference is taking placed on unceded Coast Salish territory, and to acknowledge that it is the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Watuth First Nations.
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The pieces in this special issue were originally presented at the 2015 Modern Languages Association’s annual convention in Vancouver. They were very much occasioned by what an increasingly large and diverse group of scholars around the globe, at least as early as the inaugural Petrocultures conference in 2012, have been calling Energy Humanities.
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