Trains, Stone, and Energetics: African Resource Culture and the Neoliberal World-Ecology

World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

“…8 The upshot of WReC's analysis is the development of we might call a materialist comparativism, a practice of literary study which compares how particular words, passages, texts, writers, styles, genres, movements and traditions are 'dialectically related to economic and political relations without exactly mirroring them'. 9 Adapting the core-periphery model of world-systems theory, which explicates unevenness as being structurally enforced on the periphery by the core (think of the historical underdevelopment of the Global South, for example), WReC's readings stress how literary forms travel in tandem with capitalist expansion, impacting upon the aesthetics of peripheral areas. The methodological implications are noteworthy.…”

“…Think of it this way: If world-literature compares the unevenness of the capitalist world-system as it is registered across literary works, then world-ecological literature is interested in how texts reveal the unevenness of the worldsystem to be dependent on nature as both resource and sink, even structurally prone to cyclical crises as it exhausts the very nature it relies on as a supposedly selfreplenishing reserve. The term 'world-ecological literature' 13 derives from environmental historian Jason W. Moore, whose theory of world-ecology is also indebted to world-systems theory. The salience of world-ecology as an analytical framework, Moore writes, is that it fastens the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.…”