Structuring Energy: Politics of the Energy Concept in Nineteenth-Century Physics, Literature, and Infrastructures
Abstract
Even as we urgently need to transition to sustainable energy sources, shifting fuel types alone will not address the persistent structural inequalities of our infrastructures. This dissertation theorizes energy’s infrastructure, which emerged contemporary to classical energy physics in the nineteenth century and naturalized western assumptions about bodies, movement, resources, and possibilities. I argue that the Victorian period is crucial to understanding how certain energy modalities are embedded in our cultural imaginaries, literatures, infrastructures, and sciences. Because energy deals in conversions and relationalities, strategies of representation such as models, fictions, figurative language, and infrastructural forms produce a version of modernity that we recognize while obscuring other possibilities. By studying energy’s nineteenth-century emergence as a scientific concept, therefore, we can approach a twenty-first century energy transition from a culturally responsive, sociopolitical perspective.