Extraction Ecologies and the Post-Extractive Imagination

• 講者：Elizabeth Carolyn Miller | Professor of English | University of California, Davis

• 主持：周序樺｜中央研究院歐美研究所副研究員

• 時間：2022年10月14日（五）15:30~17:30

主題簡介

本演講將由加利福尼亞大學戴維斯分校英語系教授伊莉莎白．卡洛琳．米勒（Elizabeth Carolyn Miller）介紹2021年出版的新書 Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion（暫譯：榨取型生態與長期枯竭的文學）。米勒教授在該書中探究工業與帝國開採在環境與文化上的遺緒，並揭示1830至1930年代的文學如何跟隨英國人將自身理解為一個全然依賴「榨取」（extraction）的帝國的推論性、想像過程：一個奠基於榨取的工業社會與礦業資源的開採產生無法復原的緊密連結，並欠缺能夠維繫現存社會關係的可行方案。

本演講將先概述書中部分核心論點，再談論書中聚焦於推想小說（speculative fiction）的篇章，以及兩種文本：蘿琪雅．薩哈瓦．侯賽因（Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain）的《蘇丹娜的夢想》（Sultana’s Dream, 1905) 和威廉．莫里斯（William Morris）的《烏有鄉訊息》（News from Nowhere, 1890）。這兩種文本均樂觀地重新想像一個不再被工業主義的石化能源體系束縛的「後榨取未來」（post-extractive future）。

This talk is taken from my new book, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton UP, 2021), which examines the environmental and cultural legacy of industrial, imperial extractivism. My book shows how literature from the 1830s to the 1930s tracks the discursive and imaginative process by which Britain 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, the talk will turn to one section of the book that focuses on speculative fiction and to 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).