Prof. Stacey Balkan publishes new essay, "Electric Ladyland: Anticolonial Solarpunk as Infrastructural Resistance in Two Works of Speculative Fiction"

Congratulations to Prof. Stacey Balkan on publication of her essay "Electric Ladyland: Anticolonial Solarpunk as Infrastructural Resistance in Two Works of Speculative Fiction" in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

The essay examines anti-extractivist climate fictions that model a radical energy politics, while also clarifying the central role of the colonial-capitalist transaction at the heart of petromodernity. Centering the twin aims of decarbonization and decolonization, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s 1905 “Sultana’s Dream”—a proto-solarpunk tale set in Victorian India—anticipates such recent fictions as Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s “Listen: A Memoir” in figuring infrastructural possibility and radical hope after the inevitable collapse of fossil capitalism; and each story likewise models a viable energy commons and thus rejects the conventionally dystopian register of much popular climate fiction.