Extraction Ecologies and the Post-Extractive Imagination

• Speaker: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller | Professor of English | University of California, Davis

• Moderator: Serena Chou | Associate Research Fellow Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

• Time: 10-14-2022 (Fri) 15:30~17:30

Abstract

This talk is taken from my new book, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton UP, 2021), which examines the environmental and cultural legacy of industrial, imperial extractivism. My book shows how literature from the 1830s to the 1930s tracks the discursive and imaginative process by which Britain came to understand itself as an empire thoroughly dependent on extraction: an extraction-based industrial society irretrievably bound up with mineral resource mining, with no viable alternative capable of preserving existing social relations. After a broad overview of some of the book's central arguments, the talk will turn to one section of the book that focuses on speculative fiction and to two texts that optimistically reimagine a post-extractive future no longer tethered to the fossil-fueled energy systems of industrialism: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's "Sultana's Dream" (1905) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890).