Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms

Passive Revolution, Fascism Redux and Utopian Praxes

Bibliographic Data

ID7739574
AuthorsSourayan Mookerjea (0000-0003-1065-6823, University of Alberta, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume33
Issue3
Pages570-593
Publication date2019-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2019.1585464
OpenAlexW2921084846
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited42

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create

Anthropocene · Degrowth · Democracy · Dystopia · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Sustainability · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Energy and Environment Impacts · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Ecology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub