“For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land,” writes Frantz Fanon in 1961. Postcolonial land inscripts imperial violence, anticolonial movements, and new extractivist regimes as it enmeshes human and nonhuman systems. Land, forests, oceans, rivers, and bush enter decolonial discourse as lush metaphors as their material counterparts shift and change in response to new economic and political realities. 19th-century imperial infrastructures regress to ruins as environments regenerate. Bush reclaims plantation, colonial bungalows shelter wildlife, decay and overgrowth mark the limits of empire. Simultaneously, new energy regimes consolidate as economies shift to oil, mining, tourism, and financial flows; the remains of imperialisms past support emergent neocolonialisms.

This panel invites papers that explore this nexus of land, energy, and narrative through literary texts, objects, and media preferably though not exclusively from the Global South. We welcome papers that investigate how global energy regimes—from plantation-based colonial economies of the 19th-century Americas to the oil-extractive economies of the 20th-century Middle East to contemporary neo-imperial tech-based global economies—have shaped the literary and cultural traditions of the Global South. We are interested in studies that focalize energy economies through literature, visual media, and material cultures; we welcome papers that investigate relationships between ecology, literature, and culture through forms (the novel, travel writing, natural history), genres (the gothic, petrofiction, climate fiction) and objects (maps, paintings, artefacts).

To propose a paper, please visit the NeMLA website: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21990. We accept in-person as well as remote presentations.