Empire, settler colonialism and energy futures : from Jules Verne to Waubgeshig Rice

• Main Author: Martens, Reuben
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Languages and Literatures; Arctic; North Pole; Jules; Verne
• Online Access: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8676218; http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-8676218

Shortly before and during the first decades of the First Industrial Revolution in Europe (ca. 1800-1840), France and most of Western Europe were experiencing wood shortages due to massive deforestation for fuelling their nations with wood and charcoal. As such, France turned to its colonial outposts to import North-American timber, in order to compensate for their shortage. Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) fictionalises this struggle; industry capitalists start mining for coal in the Arctic, because of predictions that existing reserves will run out in 500 years, and so justify drastically changing its environment. This oppressive imperial and settler-colonial imaginary continues to have reverberations in the present; Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) imagines a post-oil native Ojibwe community in Northern Ontario who, stripped of their energy and natural resources, struggle to survive the harsh Canadian winter. Like many other native communities in North America, the Ojibwe people were displaced by settler colonialists who claimed the natural resources that their Native lands held. In this paper, I want to demonstrate how this neglected history of settler colonialism and empire in the search for energy resources still informs energy futures today, through a comparative reading of Verne and Rice’s novels, which sketch out very different, yet incredibly entangled future scenarios.