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As the price of oil climbs toward $100 a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be…
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Regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in postwar Japan, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) questioned traditional Japanese thought and radically reconfigured an understanding of the subject’s relationship to the world. His works were also central in drawing Japanese attention to the problems inherent in western colonialism and to the cultural importance of Asia, especially China. Takeuchi’s…
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Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as…
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This paper examines two apparently contrasting cases: the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian scapulimancy practices, and the impact that the introduction of electric light had on rural Mongolians. Scapula and other divinatory items are analysed as ‘metonymic fields’ – bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to…
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In this analysis of three generations of women in a Chinese silk factory, Lisa Rofel brilliantly interweaves the intimate details of her observations with a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity in a postmodern age. The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares…
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he more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably…
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Danzanravjaa (1803-1856), is Mongolia’s most influential Buddhist poet and philosopher. Born during a time of political upheaval, he challenged the Tibetan Buddhist establishment and developed a form of practice that advocated a direct engagement with the world.
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Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized – both mystified and demystified – during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century…
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In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life…
