Scholarly interest in literary engagements with resource extraction and extractivism has grown exponentially over the last decade. Special issues (Textual Practice 25.3; Modern Fiction Studies 66.1) and monographs (Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 2017) have explored how writers render visible the pervasive impact of extraction on communities and landscapes, and considered the shaping effect of extractivism on literary forms, generic modes and tropes. At present, however, research remains primarily focused on regions in the Northern Hemisphere, and on the extraction of hydrocarbons, particularly oil. Further, as Szeman and Wenzel point out, the widespread adoption and application of extractivism as a ‘conceptual umbrella term’ risks ‘collapsing historical, geographical, and cultural distinctions that should be important to fully understanding the specific operations of extraction, including the ideologies and imaginaries that surround it at any given time and in any given space’ (515-16). There is need, then, for the field to widen its geographical and historical remit, and to think more deeply about the ways particular types of extraction play out in particular contexts and through specific literary traditions.

In this seminar, we invite papers that consider literary responses to various forms of resource extraction within settler colonial states. Extraction was and remains central to settler colonial projects around the world; the settler state and the resource are ‘mutually constituted and ontologically dependent, each brought into the world through process of violent dispossession’ (Simpson 3). How has literature reckoned with this fact? How have writers deployed literary form to uphold or challenge the extractive logic of the settler colonial state? To what extent and through what means is literature capable of assessing and intervening in the social, political, economic, environmental, and ecological causes and effects of resource extraction?

Topics that may be explored include but are not limited to:

• Resource nationalism and the settler colonial state


• The entanglement between settler colonial literature, nationalism, and resource extraction


• The exploited body and labour extraction


• First Nations’ responses to extraction and resource sovereignty


• Local-global connections and the exported resource


• Literature as extractivist or anti-extractivist discourse


• Genre and resource extraction


• The usefulness of extractivism as a concept for engaging with settler colonial contexts


• Speculative fictions and post-extractive futures


• Literary responses to specific extracted resources, e.g. coal, timber, whale oil, or methods of extraction, e.g. fracking, open-cut mining