We are very pleased to invite you to materia’s first event of the academic year: a Reading Session in collaboration with the DLCL’s Marxisms Reading Group!

What: Reading Session: energies of energy

When: October 17th, 5-6:30pm

Where: Pigott Hall 252

This reading session will be an introduction to our yearly theme: energies of energy. Our events will build upon the previous years’ discussion on the interrelationships between human collectivities and their so-called instruments, but this time our focus will be to survey the latest developments in the subfield of Energy Humanities since the publication of the homonymous 2017 anthology by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer (Johns Hopkins UP) – see below for more details.

We will read a selection that includes fragments from Fraginals’s El ingenio (1964:1978) Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985,) and Santiago Acosta’s article “Cultures of Geopower,” published in Spring this year. Our idea is to situate the questions surrounding energy in the subfield in question in relation to the concept of labor power. You can access all texts and some related materials here.

We kindly ask you to focus on the Introduction to the Energy Humanities anthology and read as much of the additional texts as you like. We will present briefly the texts mentioned here.