Hardback | |
February 6, 2019 | |
9781421427560 | |
English | |
256 | |
14 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
1 Pounds (US) | |
1 Pounds (US) | |
$52.00 USD, £38.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Electronic book text | |
March 6, 2019 | |
9781421427577 | |
9781421427560 | |
English | |
256 | |
14 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
$52.00 USD, £38.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Mineral Rites
An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy
In Mineral Rites, Bob Johnson illustrates that fossil fuels are embodied today not only in the morning commute and in home HVAC systems but in the everyday textures, rituals, architecture, and artifacts of modern life. In a series of illuminating essays touching on such disparate topics as hot yoga, electric robots, automobility, the RMS Titanic, reality TV, and the modern novel, Johnson takes the discussion of fossil fuels and their role in climate change far beyond the traditional domains of policy and economics into the deepest layers of the body, ideology, and psyche.
An audacious revision to the history of modernity, Mineral Rites shows how fossil fuels operate at the level of infrapolitics and how they permeate life as second nature.
About the Author
Reviews
"An evocative and well-written cultural analysis of the fossil economy that combines rich examples with profound questions and tangled ambiguities. Johnson examines a number of different and fascinating cultural texts to uncover the energy transition from an organic muscular economy to fossil fuels."—Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse University, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
"Bob Johnson's Mineral Rites is a compelling and original take on fossil capitalism. With a historian's eye and writerly flair, he takes us on a fossil fueled journey through time and space. This book is an indispensable guide to our American addiction to fossil fuels—and possibly, how to extract ourselves from its deathly grip."—Julie Sze, University of California–Davis, author of Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis
"In this fascinating, stunningly original book, Johnson astutely combines the personal with the political, the local with the global, the cultural with the material to chart the pleasures and pains of fossil capitalism. As the climate crisis continues to intensify, Mineral Rites offers an engrossing and provocative history of the present."—Finis Dunaway, Trent University, author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images
"An exceptional book. Mineral Rites identifies vital energy modalities and traces their social life and mediation across the bodies, objects, affects, and cultural artifacts of fossil fueled modernity. With climate change in stark view, Johnson divines the historically uneven and destructive consequences of high carbon life, with its class, gendered, and racialized formations, in a stunning variety of practices, times, and spaces: the yoga studio, dinner table, ocean liner, highway; in historical attitudes to technology and in televisual and literary narratives. A thrilling and groundbreaking text in energy and environmental humanities."—Graeme Macdonald, Associate Professor, University of Warwick, coeditor of Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Contexts and Critical Perspectives
"Literary and cultural critic Bob Johnson provides a language with which to make sense of these complex, embodied, everyday experiences of extracted energy."—Public Books
"The subtitle of Mineral Rites is particularly apt, for it truly is a work of rhetorical archaeology – Johnson peels back the layers of what we know (or think we know) about the fossil fuel industry to reveal the mind-bogglingly expansive scope of how the fossil economy reaches out and affects peoples' lived experiences in vastly different ways . . . As a cautionary tale, it is a veritable punch to the gut that leaves us gasping for air."—Material Culture
The Johns Hopkins University Press | |
Energy Humanities | |
|
|
Hardback | |
February 6, 2019 | |
9781421427560 | |
English | |
256 | |
14 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
1 Pounds (US) | |
1 Pounds (US) | |
$52.00 USD, £38.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Electronic book text | |
March 6, 2019 | |
9781421427577 | |
9781421427560 | |
English | |
256 | |
14 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
$52.00 USD, £38.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles in TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Power Resources / Fossil Fuels
Access to Energy
Coal and Empire
Scientists and Swindlers
Other Titles in History of the Americas
The Perils of Race-Thinking
Black Health in the South
Land and Liberty