Pablo Mukerhjee, "Fossil Imprints," INCS 2020 "GREEN" Plenary @ USC in Los Angeles 3/7/2020
Channel: INCS 2020
Date: 2020-08-12

Mukherjee’s Saturday evening talk provided a critical lens for thinking about the sorts of environmental histories narrated by Robinson, turning our attention from natural encounters to energy frontiers, and the relation between the climate and energy economies. A close study of scenes of Indian labor, as fictionalized in “Nil Darpin,” an 1860 play by Dinabandhu Mitra, and  Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Bridge Builders” from 1893, served to raise a series of questions about the “energy humanities,” a growing field of humanities research that evaluates the relation between energy systems, human labor, cultural production, and climate justice. As Mukerhjee explained, the turn to energy system has tilted ecocritical accounts in several ways: from the consideration of global impacts to particularized local histories; from the disjunction of historical periodization to the continuities of past and present environmental harms; and to a reading of human labor and political power that is rooted in energy resources and their uneven distribution by global capital. On this view, the juxtaposition of Mithra and Kipling does not only stage a confrontation between Indian nationalism and British imperialism, but can also excavate a more basic, shared understanding of the forms of energy, the nature of power, and the relation between gender, freedom, and justice within both liberalism and authoritarianism, an analysis that might signal the “end of the Capitalocene.”