Jennifer Wenzel - Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment

Fueling Culture

Fueling Culture

101 Words for Energy and Environment

Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger

Editors

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK 2017

Copyright 2017 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Image by Ernst Logar

Jennifer Wenzel

Warren Cariou

Daniel Gustav Anderson

Gerry Canavan

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Donald Pease

Melissa Haynes

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Rob Nixon

Daniel Barber

Rafico Ruiz

Gordon Sayre

Lindsey Green-Simms

Brenda K. Marshall

Kit Dobson

Claudia Aradau

Ian Buchanan

Caren Irr

Arif Dirlik

Amy Zhang

Ashley Dawson

Susie Hatmaker

Sara Dorow

Andrew Pendakis

Jason W. Moore

Peter Hitchcock

Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker

Sharad Chari

Claire Colebrook

Timothy Morton

Alan Ackerman

Bob Johnson

Dominic Boyer

Vivasvan Soni

Michael Niblett

Frederick Buell

Joanna Zylinska

Priscilla Wald

Anna Sajecki

Franco Berardi

Joseph Masco

Graeme Macdonald

Imre Szeman

Todd Dufresne

Sheena Wilson

Toby Miller

Cymene Howe

Noah Toly

Geo Takach

Ed Kashi

Jeff Diamanti

Robert Ryder

Mark Simpson

Alice Kuzniar

John Soluri

Lisa Gitelman

Richard Grusin

Adam Dickinson

Juan Cole

Louise Green

Timothy Kaposy

Lisa Parks

Philip Aghoghovwia

Matthew Flisfeder

Gabrielle Hecht

Michael Truscello

Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson

Michael Watts

Brent Ryan Bellamy

Georgiana Banita

Darin Barney

Gay Hawkins

Kelly Jazvac and Patricia Corcoran

Werner Hofer

Susie OBrien

Janet Stewart

Karen Pinkus

Deena Rymhs

Andrew Loman

Erin Morton

Alexei Penzin

Ml Hogan

Jennifer Jacquet

Amanda Boetzkes

Antonia Juhasz

Stephanie LeMenager

Lisa Sideris

Spencer Morrison

Bart Beaty

Lynn Badia

Leerom Medovoi

Laurie Shannon

Daniel Worden

Kirsty Robertson

Crystal Bartolovich

Allan Stoekl

Philipp Lehmann

Donald V. Kingsbury

D. Graham Burnett

Vin Nardizzi

Susan Turcot

Stevphen Shukaitis

Image by Pedro Reyes

Imre Szeman

Our compendium of keywords is organized alphabetically. In addition to listing the keywords in the Table of Contents, we offer some further aid to navigation with two systems of cross-reference. When one of our contributors uses another Fueling Culture keyword in his or her discussion, we indicate the link by formatting the term in SMALL CAPS. Also, at the end of each entry, you will find a See also section with a list of keywords that intersect or overlap with it in less obvious wayssometimes ironically and, in a few cases, humorously. In the e-book version, the keywords are hyperlinked to their destinations for ease of navigation through the book.

Both Jennifer Wenzels Introduction and Imre Szemans Afterword offer maps of the terrain that our contributors stake out in Fueling Culture. In so doing, they draw out some conceptual threads that you might use to guide your reading. These include:

important geographical sites and paradigmatic spaces of energy production, consumption, and conflict;

the many substances and forces that humans have used to produce energy;

several technological developments associated with energy and its infrastructure;

the myriad unwanted side effects and unintended consequences of energy extraction and use;

several forms of cultural production; and

a slew of abstract nouns, many with the Latinate suffix -tion, which touch upon various affects, social formations, and political predicaments of energy.

This book will offer insight no matter how you use it. Choose your own path. Plug in. Let the sparks fly.

FIGURE 1. Infinite. (Ernst Logar)

Jennifer Wenzel

One of the first acts of armed struggle undertaken by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) that launched on December 16, 1961, was the dynamiting of an electrical pylon in Durban and a power station near Port Elizabeth.targets and its commitment to avoiding injury and loss of life. But this tacticdescribed in the 1980s as a campaign to make the black townships, and South Africa more broadly, ungovernableis perhaps better understood as an attack on infrastructure and, more specifically still, as an attack on the infrastructure of energy.

Part of what fueled this tactic was the racialization of access to energy in apartheid South Africa. Most black South Africans lived, perforce and by force, off-grid. Although the legendary jazz culture of Sophiatown in the fabulous 1950s might be described as electric, it was, in fact, illuminated mostly by

From the slantwise angle of a downed pylon, it is possible to understand the anti-apartheid struggle as a war waged onand forattaching dwellings to the grid, thereby restoring service that had been cut off (Bond and Ngwane 2010, 2001). The national utility Eskom found itself without the infrastructural capacity to meet the energy needs of the new and democratic South Africa, as opposed to the privileged few. As in the 1980s, when comrades burst out of the townships and took the struggle to city streets to make South Africa ungovernableand to demonstrate that apartheid was untenable, we might even say unsustainableEskoms lack of capacity became apparent to the nation as a whole in early 2008, with unscheduled load shedding (in American parlance, rolling blackouts) darkening entire cities at once. Once again, but in a very different vein, the struggle-era call and response slogan