Read Prof. Stacey Balkan's Author's Note for Rogues in the Postcolony

Professor Stacey Balkan's Author's Note to Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India appears in Energy Humanities (June 1, 2023).

An excerpt:

Upon encountering the title of my new book, colleagues often ask how one “narrates extraction,” which is to say: what do stories have to do with an economic and ecological process like resource extraction? This is a question with which I often grapple in the classroom. Perhaps a better, if more complicated version, would be something that I ask my graduate students: how do we understand the role of aesthetic expression in the manufacture and reinforcement of energopolitical desire—a desire, often fueled by fossilized carbon, to achieve something like “freedom” or “progress,” or any of a number of developmentalist euphemisms for a commoditized form of prosperity born of extractivist violence? In a similar vein: are there narratives that contest what have been called the “enabling fictions” of “economic development”?   [ . . . ]

Read the full text at Energy Humanities .