Energy Humanities (Call for book Proposals -- and news about the first book!)

ENERGY HUMANITIES
Book series with Johns Hopkins University Press

Edited by Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman


Responding to growing public concern about anthropogenic climate change and
the unsustainability of the fuels we currently use to power our modern
society, in just the past decade the humanities and social sciences have
witnessed a remarkable efflorescence of research exploring the significance
of energy in history, society and culture. The series Energy Humanities
will showcase the very best books in this diverse and emergent field, with
an especial focus on works that are pushing the boundaries of how we
understand the petrocultures of modernity and the possible future forms of
decarbonized modernity.


If you're invested in submitting a proposal for a book in this series,
contact us!

Dominic Boyer ([email protected])

Imre Szeman ([email protected])

- - - - - -
first book in the series:

Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy
Bob Johnson

https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/mineral-rites

Spanning the past two hundred years, this book offers an alternative
history of modernity that restores to fossil fuels their central role in
the growth of capitalism and modernity itself, including the emotional
attachments and real injuries that they generate and command. Everything
about us—our bodies, minds, sense of self, nature, reason, and faith—has
been conditioned by a global infrastructure of carbon flows that saturates
our habits, thoughts, and practices. And it is that deep energy
infrastructure that provides material for the imagination and senses and
even shapes our expectations about what it means to be fully human in the
twenty-first century.

In *Mineral Rites*, Bob Johnson illustrates that fossil fuels are embodied
today not only in the morning commute and in home HVAC systems but in the
everyday textures, rituals, architecture, and artifacts of modern life. In
a series of illuminating essays touching on such disparate topics as hot
yoga, electric robots, automobility, the RMS *Titanic*, reality TV, and the
modern novel, Johnson takes the discussion of fossil fuels and their role
in climate change far beyond the traditional domains of policy and
economics into the deepest layers of the body, ideology, and psyche.

An audacious revision to the history of modernity, *Mineral Rites* shows
how fossil fuels operate at the level of infrapolitics and how they
permeate life as second nature.

Reviews:



"A highly original, imaginative book that offers an alternative history of
modernity. Beautifully—at times, even poetically—written, *Mineral Rites* is
animated by a clear sense of political urgency and a willingness to recast
familiar stories in a new and original light. Creative and insightful."

— Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University, author of *Radiation
Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s*



"An evocative and well-written cultural analysis of the fossil economy that
combines rich examples with profound questions and tangled ambiguities.
Johnson examines a number of different and fascinating cultural texts to
uncover the energy transition from an organic muscular economy to fossil
fuels."

— Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse University, author of *Lifeblood: Oil,
Freedom, and the Forces of Capital*



"Bob Johnson's *Mineral Rites* is a compelling and original take on fossil
capitalism. With a historian's eye and writerly flair, he takes us on a
fossil fueled journey through time and space. This book is an indispensable
guide to our American addiction to fossil fuels—and possibly, how to
extract ourselves from its deathly grip."

— Julie Sze, University of California–Davis, author of *Fantasy Islands:
Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis*



"In this fascinating, stunningly original book, Johnson astutely combines
the personal with the political, the local with the global, the cultural
with the material to chart the pleasures and pains of fossil capitalism. As
the climate crisis continues to intensify, *Mineral Rites* offers an
engrossing and provocative history of the present."

— Finis Dunaway, Trent University, author of *Seeing Green: The Use and
Abuse of American Environmental Images*



"An exceptional book. *Mineral Rites* identifies vital energy modalities
and traces their social life and mediation across the bodies, objects,
affects, and cultural artifacts of fossil fueled modernity. With climate
change in stark view, Johnson divines the historically uneven and
destructive consequences of high carbon life, with its class, gendered, and
racialized formations, in a stunning variety of practices, times, and
spaces: the yoga studio, dinner table, ocean liner, highway; in historical
attitudes to technology and in televisual and literary narratives. A
thrilling and groundbreaking text in energy and environmental humanities."

— Graeme Macdonald, Associate Professor, University of Warwick,
coeditor of *Scottish
Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Contexts and Critical
Perspectives*

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