Energy Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Approach

An interdisciplinary discussion organized by the Doctoral Fellows at the IECS:

Isidora Cortes-Monroy Gazitua, Zixian Liu, and Sajdeep Soomal

12:00pm to 2:00pm

JHB 100 A, Jackman Humanities Building, 262 Bloor St W

Lunch will be served

To RSVP and signal any accessibility accommodations you may need, please respond here by the 23rd March.

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Energy Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Energy is more than just a resource; it a way of organizing society, environment and economy. In this panel discussion on the matter and meaning of energy, our interdisciplinary cohort of Doctoral Fellows at the Institute of Environment, Conservation and Sustainability (IECS) will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which energy is understood, represented, and negotiated across different disciplinary contexts. After sharing insights from their research findings, our panelists will engage with questions such as: How do energy systems shape our relationships with the natural world? In what ways do historical and contemporary narratives of energy production and consumption reflect broader societal values? How can interdisciplinary research inform new understandings of energy transitions and their social implications? From the small technologies used in the mines of Maoist China to the energy narratives produced through Chilean film, the panel will tackle the narration of energy across time and space.

The Technopolitics of Fungibility: Union Carbide and the Racial Fantasy of Chemical Labour

Sajdeep Soomal, Department of History, University of Toronto

Placing chemistry in the historical context of North American racial capitalism, I show how the labour power interred in chemical bodies was sought out by liberal chemists amid the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement. Chemists devised methods of utilizing molecular substances as reactive agents to assist with the laborious tasks of colonial capitalist modernity such as mineral extraction, railroad building, insect elimination, and food preservation. Through a close reading of the “Hand of God” series of advertisements commissioned by the North American chemical corporation Union Carbide in the mid 20th century, I show how chemical corporations fantasized about the fungibility of Black labour by fetishizing the capacity of the white hand to wield the energetic power of chemical bodies such uranium and carbon, without attending to the racialized labour that was required to support its global infrastructure of extraction and refinement. By doing so, I demonstrate how our narrativization of energy must attend to the chemical, racial and psychological context of its historical development and tactical deployment.

“Small Is Revolutionary”: Small Technologies, Radical Extractivism, and Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Maoist China

Zixian Liu, Department of History, University of Toronto

Contemporary debates on sustainability, alternative technologies, and people-centered development rarely mention Maoist China as either a precursor or cautionary tale. In this talk, I bring the Maoist challenge to big science and technocracy into view by uncovering revolutionary China’s little-known promotion of small technologies in the mining industry from the 1960s to the 1970s, such as rammed-earth construction and artisanal mining, under the framework of “mass science.” Through an analysis of energy and technological narratives, I discuss how the Maoist regime positioned itself as a technopolitically radical alternative to both capitalism and Soviet socialism. In the Maoist sociotechnical imaginaries, the socialist state would cultivate desirable class consciousness, technological literacy, and political subjects by advocating small-technologies and brining “epistemological empowerment” to small-tech users and researchers.

Teleological Energy: The Energy of Plot in Surire and Hombre Eléctrico

Isidora Cortes-Monroy Gazitua, Department of Spanish and Portguese, University of Toronto

What does the narrative expectation for closure reveal about our relationship to energy? Or put differently, how do we create the necessary narrative energy to arrive at a satisfactory ending in a story? My presentation examines the intersection between the field of narrative theory and the energy humanities, examining how the frustrated plots of two Chilean films reveals the energy unconscious of teleological storytelling. In conversation with scholars who have already commented on the insufficiency of teleological narratives within the context of our multi-species climate breakdown, my paper argues that these films challenge teleological narratives by bringing attention to the narrative energy that is absent. Taking my cue from Baroni’s reconceptualization of plot as the energy that is produced from a story’s tension and resolution, as well as Frederick’s narrative exploration of digressions, I consider the ways in which the lacking energy of the films’ plot “unsettles” (to use Frederick’s term) the “energy unconscious” within plot.