Modernism, Energy, and Environment

May 11, 2022 By: Thomas S. Davis

Critical, speculative, and imaginative forays into modernism’s relationships with energy systems, ecological change, and the nonhuman world.

Black Migrants and Climate Change Vulnerability Amid the Great Smog of London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

January 28, 2026 By: Saba Pakdel

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

Introduction to “Letters from the Field”

September 10, 2025 By: Sookyoung Lee

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.

Mei Foo Lamps: Standard Oil’s Old Technology and New Frontier

December 7, 2023 By: Yandong Li

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...

Conrad’s Dynamite Time

December 9, 2022 By: Tobias Wilson-Bates

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...

Modernism, Energy, and Environment

May 11, 2022 By: Thomas S. Davis

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...
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Conrad’s Dynamite Time

December 9, 2022 By: Tobias Wilson-Bates

Volume 7 Cycle 2

Tags:

resources extraction

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 that we can read “The Secret Agent’s imagery of light and darkness not simply as moral signifiers, but more particularly, and more materially, as components in the representation of a global economy of energy forms.”[1] Few writers have ever participated more materially in the supply chain of resource extraction than Conrad, whose nautical career spanned the transition from wind to steam power, and whose novels dramatize its infrastructure from exhausted silver mines to the Congolese rubber trade.

Revisiting the late 19th century, when global industry and energy forms began to take the shapes still recognizable today gives modern readers access to the complex pre-history of our contemporary climate crisis. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller points out how “Industrial-era exhaustion debates demand reconsideration now because they show that the transition to extraction-based life was understood at the time to entail a depleted earth for future generations.”[2] From the outset of our extraction-dependent cultural turn, there has been an ongoing discussion of the unavoidable damage of depleting resources, and, at the same time, a struggle to relate that damage to the broader public. In reading Conrad’s entry into the genre of Dynamite Fiction, we may potentially find an early model for how a mysterious explosive crime can twin with the explosive new technology of resource extraction to make the violence of energy modernity available to readers.

Listen to Tobias Wilson Bates in conversation with Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Devin Griffiths here:

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Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is a professor in the English Department at UC Davis. Her recently-completed book titled Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion appeared with Princeton University Press in October 2021.

Devin Griffiths is an associate English professor at the University of Southern California. His first book, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins, published in 2016 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes

[1] Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 198.

[2] Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 35.