Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures: Petrocultural Violence and Resistance in Contemporary Indigenous Literature, Art, and Film

This proposed project, entitled "Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures", will offer the first in-depth study of literary and artistic Indigenous (American, Canadian, and Australian) responses to settler-colonial extractivism from three carefully chosen sites; namely the coal and uranium mines in the Navajo Nation (USA), the Athabasca tar sands (Canada), and the Adani Carmichael coal mining site in Queensland (Australia). The impact of fossil fuel extraction has been a key concern in the field of the energy humanities, and this project will break new ground in assessing that impact in the cultural production of demographics directly exposed to extractivist violence. 

This project aims to document the understudied concomitant contemporary cultural and aesthetic Indigenous responses of trauma and resistance that the violence of extractivism has evoked in Indigenous communities. Through an examination of contemporary Indigenous creative materials, this project will contribute a new critical perspective to crucial conversations of extractivist violence and environmental justice, in order to expand ongoing discussions of extractivism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous rights and futures. This project is original in its exploration of environmental (and thus racial and social) justice, trauma, and resistance as expressed in Indigenous cultural production which addresses petrocultural infrastructural violences.