Elemental Unevenness: Place-making in Literary and Cultural Forms
The way we imagine, represent, and signify the relations between empire and environment significantly shapes contemporary discourses on climate change, development, and globalization. Colonial and neoliberal legacies produce a “combined and uneven development” of the world system, resulting in hierarchies of metropolitan and peripheral relations. The elemental composition of environments (such as air, water, soil, and fire) in literary and cultural forms maps the intensification of these uneven relations under the capitalist mode of production. Jason Moore argues that the economy and environment are not independent of each other and posits that capitalism is a way of organizing nature (2015).