Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution, fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.

KEYWORDS:

• Renewable energy transition
• decolonizing
• energy democracy
• commons
• utopian regenerative praxis
• degrowth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sourayan Mookerjea is the director of the Intermedia Research Studio at the Department of Sociology, University of Alberta. Current projects include SSHRC funded research Intermedia Ecologies: Decolonizing Commons Theory, and, as co-director, Feminist Energy Futures and is co-editor of Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader.

Notes

1. For more details, see Intermedia Research Studio, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/irs/ and Feminist Energy Futures, https://www.justpowers.ca/projects/feminist-energy-futures/

2. To date we have research-created a feminist renewable energy transition role-playing game, Perfect Storm! (https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/perfect-storm-v3/) and started building an archive of stories and reflections on renewable energy transition: (https://www.justpowers.ca/projects/idoc/). On research-creation see N. Loveless (2017, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.