COML 6900 - [Energy, Empire, and Modernity]

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015. Co-meets with COML 4900.

A. Banerjee.

No technology is more freighted with the dual association between empire and modernity than those which extract, generate, harness, and manage energy. The course examines steam, electricity, nuclear power, and petroleum as focal points of this dynamic. Between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, each came to represent rationality, development, mobility, and nation-building on the one hand and territorial conquest, military expediency, economic expansion, and governance of subject populations on the other. Rarely, however, is the role of energy examined at the conjuncture of modernity and empire. That is what the course intends to do by juxtaposing literary, visual, philosophical, and social scientific treatments from the western/ northern perspective with those from colonial and postcolonial ones. The objective is to generate a critical vocabulary for the ways in which energy - and indeed, its potent metaphorical function as index of power - influences discourses of coloniality and modernity, and to investigate how the two categories are inextricably related to this day. Such an approach is particularly relevant for our current moment, when energy crises and power politics, both literal and symbolic, can no longer be mapped within a stable locus of “modern” societies or well-defined nation-states.