Postcolonial resources, pedagogical resistance: An energy-driven interview with Professor Jennifer Wenzel

Abstract

In this interview, conducted by email in the summer of 2016, Professor Jennifer Wenzel of Columbia University follows up on her presentation at the Postcolonial Studies Association’s 2014 Resources of Resistance conference by reflecting on the various, cumulative and increasingly complex problems facing postcolonial and environmental scholars today. Drawing upon a range of critical resources, she discusses the ways in which postcolonialists can engage productively with the energy-based struggles of late petromodernity and, in the process, relate issues of energy and resource inequality to other ongoing challenges of postcoloniality. She considers how a revived concern for the environment might reinvigorate postcolonialism’s tradition of resistance and its demands for collective action, and how new modes of energy and resource criticism might similarly work to revitalise postcolonial and world-literary studies and reorient their respective methodological and pedagogical practices.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial studies
• energy humanities
• environmental humanities
• petrocriticism
• ecocriticism
• world literature
• critical methods