Modernism, Energy, and Environment

What would it mean to reread Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a narrative about the representation of Black migrants during the smog? The smog, the 1950s’ concerning ecological and climate issue, results from the mix of coal-burning smoke with London fog. Upon combustion, coal emits visible black smoke into the lingering fog, causing various health and respiratory hazards. The Lonely Londoners depicts the 1950s, when the Windrush generation of migrants, particularly Black Afro-Caribbeans, arrive in London during the smog and, at the same time, encounter growing racial and anti-immigrant sentiments. A close reading of the novel reveals a running analogy between black smoke and Black migrants as Selvon excavates the parallel of air pollution and racism. The analogy underwrites the assumption that the blackness of the smog is toxic, and in the popular imagination, Black immigrants presumably “pollute” England. In this essay, I will argue that The Lonely Londoners astutely places racialization and pollution as figures and

I have been tasked with introducing “Letters from the Field”, a new series of blog correspondences on doing modernist studies while living through climate change and calamities. “Letters from the Field” grows out of conversations that have taken place at online and in-person events organized by the MSA’s Modernism and the Environment special interest group (SIG) over the past two years. We bring these conversations to forum on Modernism, Energy, and Environment in the hope of having the broader community participate in the exchange. To situate you in the conversation, I’ll provide an account of how this collaborative project came about before sharing my own reflections on what it might mean to think, act, and study together as things fall apart again and again.

At the top of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, an exhibition designated “New Frontiers” showcases digital art and design works that are “technology-forward” and “innovative.” [1] The exhibition borrows its title from the Rockefeller Center’s inaugural arts program of the same name, led by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (Schneider, “New Frontiers”). More than half a century ago, at the same building, Socony-Vacuum, one of the legacies of John D...

On February 15, 1894, a bomb went off in Greenwich Park near the Royal Observatory. The event set off a media frenzy that, thirteen years later, resulted in Joseph Conrad writing The Secret Agent (1907). Recent readings of the novel have begun to explore how in constructing his ironic re-mediation of the event, Conrad also began to lay bare some of the complex energy infrastructures of his historical moment. In Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, Allen Macduffie argues...

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work. The directors believed these canvases would reveal how “Manet’s growing fascination with contemporary fashion and femininity coincided with a steep decline in his health and mobility, a confrontation with his own human frailty.” [1] If the emphasis of the exhibition fell on his less familiar works, the narrative of the modern artist as a suffering genius sounds...