Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil's firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.

The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called "the switch." Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.

About the Author
Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. His recent books include On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (WVU Press), After Oil (WVU Press), Energy Humanities: An Anthology, and Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment.

Jeff Diamanti teaches literary and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the editor of Contemporary Marxist Theory, Materialism and the Critique of Energy, and The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, as well as a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory on energy humanities and a double issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities on climate realism.

Reviews
"An exemplary multidisciplinary approach to entangled questions of energy, politics, and aesthetics. Energy Culture should excite and inspire an interdisciplinary community of scholars, artists, and activists; it not only points to possible ways forward for thinking and acting, but also offers tangible, provocative examples of what our creative and critical practices might do."- Thomas S. Davis, author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life



Book Information
ISBN 9781949199123
Author Imre Szeman
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint West Virginia University Press
Publisher West Virginia University Press
Weight(grams) 577g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 154mm * 17mm