Extraction Ecologies and the Post-Extractive Imagination

This talk is taken from my new book, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton UP, 2021). Extraction Ecologies examines the long environmental-cultural legacy of industrial, imperial extractivism, a mode of human relations with the natural world that emerged in the early nineteenth century with the birth of the fossil economy. My book shows how literature from the 1830s to the 1930s tracks the discursive and imaginative process by which Britain and the British Empire 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, this talk will turn to one section of the book that focuses on speculative fiction and its generic capacities for worldbuilding. Here I will discuss 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).