Jennifer Wenzel
Jennifer Wenzel is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2010 Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
With Imre Szeman and the late Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited "Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment" (Fordham, 2017) a key text in energy humanities featuring brief think-pieces on the intersections of energy and culture by scholars from across humanities and social sciences.
A new monograph, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature," has just been published by Fordham University Press. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).
Her current project, "The Fossil-Fueled Imagination: How (and Why) to Read for Energy," investigates the role of literary and cultural imagining in shaping our relationship to fossil fuels.
Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2010 Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
With Imre Szeman and the late Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited "Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment" (Fordham, 2017) a key text in energy humanities featuring brief think-pieces on the intersections of energy and culture by scholars from across humanities and social sciences.
A new monograph, "The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature," has just been published by Fordham University Press. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).
Her current project, "The Fossil-Fueled Imagination: How (and Why) to Read for Energy," investigates the role of literary and cultural imagining in shaping our relationship to fossil fuels.
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Books by Jennifer Wenzel
How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? This book argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Working between postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and world literature studies, I show how both environmental discourse and world literature tend to confuse parts and wholes. Drawing on insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, the book considers what it means to read for the planet: to read from near to there, across experiential divides, and at more than one scale. A supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics, I argue, can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.
The Disposition of Nature has been shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).
https://twitter.com/ASAP_artsNOW/status/1315763489571561474/photo/1
Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.
Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new.
In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination.
The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption.
Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Northern Illinois U; Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, U of Michigan; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/oil-culture
Contents:
Introduction Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray Part 1: Disciplinary Constellations: New Forms of Knowledge
1. Capitalizing on English Literature: Disciplinarity, Academic Labor and Postcolonial Studies Claire Westall
2. Dangerous Relations? Lessons from the Interface of Postcolonial Studies and International Relations Simon Obendorf
3. Managing Postcolonialism Mrinalini Greedharry and Pasi Ahonen
4. Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form John C. Hawley
Part 2: Case Studies: Geocultures, Topographies, Occlusions
5. Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies Patrick Williams
6. Facing/Defacing Robert Mugabe: Land Reclamation, Race and the End of Colonial Accountability Ashleigh Harris
7. Staging the Mulata: Performing Cuba Alison Fraunhar
8. Amongst the Cannibals: Articulating Masculinity in Postcolonial Weimar Germany Eva Bischoff
9. Postcolonial Postcommunism? Cristina Sandru
Part 3: Horizons: Environment, Materialism, World
10. Neoliberalism, Genre and the "Tragedy of the Commons" Rob Nixon
11. Reading Fanon Reading Nature Jennifer Wenzel
12. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan 13. If Oil Could Speak, What Would It Say? Crystal Bartolovich 14. Inherit the World: World-Literature, "Rising Asia" and the World-Ecology Sharae Deckard
Papers by Jennifer Wenzel
How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? This book argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Working between postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and world literature studies, I show how both environmental discourse and world literature tend to confuse parts and wholes. Drawing on insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, the book considers what it means to read for the planet: to read from near to there, across experiential divides, and at more than one scale. A supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics, I argue, can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.
The Disposition of Nature has been shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).
https://twitter.com/ASAP_artsNOW/status/1315763489571561474/photo/1
Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.
Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new.
In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination.
The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption.
Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Northern Illinois U; Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, U of Michigan; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/oil-culture
Contents:
Introduction Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray Part 1: Disciplinary Constellations: New Forms of Knowledge
1. Capitalizing on English Literature: Disciplinarity, Academic Labor and Postcolonial Studies Claire Westall
2. Dangerous Relations? Lessons from the Interface of Postcolonial Studies and International Relations Simon Obendorf
3. Managing Postcolonialism Mrinalini Greedharry and Pasi Ahonen
4. Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form John C. Hawley
Part 2: Case Studies: Geocultures, Topographies, Occlusions
5. Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies Patrick Williams
6. Facing/Defacing Robert Mugabe: Land Reclamation, Race and the End of Colonial Accountability Ashleigh Harris
7. Staging the Mulata: Performing Cuba Alison Fraunhar
8. Amongst the Cannibals: Articulating Masculinity in Postcolonial Weimar Germany Eva Bischoff
9. Postcolonial Postcommunism? Cristina Sandru
Part 3: Horizons: Environment, Materialism, World
10. Neoliberalism, Genre and the "Tragedy of the Commons" Rob Nixon
11. Reading Fanon Reading Nature Jennifer Wenzel
12. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan 13. If Oil Could Speak, What Would It Say? Crystal Bartolovich 14. Inherit the World: World-Literature, "Rising Asia" and the World-Ecology Sharae Deckard
Please see the published version at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/635544.
300 word abstracts due May 4; completed 4000-7000 word essays due August 1.
Please see attached document for full description and submission details.
Panel sponsored by the Division on Literature in English other than British and American (to be renamed Global Anglophone).
250 word abstracts to Jennifer Wenzel (jw2497@columbia.edu) by 15 March.