CCDGB Lab | Toward a Caribbean Genealogy of Energy: Cosmologies of Energy in Modernity’s First World

Please join the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute for our 2024-25 speaker series. CCDGB is part of The Entanglement Project, an FHI initiative focused on the intersections of race, health, and climate.

The story of the rise of "energy" usually centers the Industrial Revolution and the coal-powered steam engine in nineteenth-century Western Europe. Though it often escapes notice, the Caribbean was actually the site of the first known industrial application of a steam engine (on a sugar plantation) and the world's first oil well (drilled by a US company in southern Trinidad). These "firsts" point toward energy's roots in colonial and imperial projects of extraction in the Caribbean, revealing the centrality of race and the plantation in understanding energy capitalism and the current climate crisis. This talk/article traces a Caribbean-centric genealogy of "energy." While taken for granted today as an abstract universal, energy was bound to specific forms of racial governance during the transition from sugar to fossil fuels as apex capitalist commodities. In tracing this genealogy, I rewrite the first two "laws of energy" as ethico-political statements on racial governance rather than descriptions of a pre-existing natural order. Adding to scholarship that has laid bare the relationship between biological sciences and race, I argue that energy sciences have also been central to sustaining (while occluding) racialized hierarchy. I then look at conceptions of energy in one southern Caribbean petro-state (Trinidad and Tobago) to elaborate speculative alternatives to the "laws of energy."

J. Brent Crosson is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at UT, Austin. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist of religion, secularism, migration, and politics. His research has focused on contestations over the limits of legal power, science, race, and religion in the Americas. His first book--Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad--is published with University of Chicago Press (2020). This monograph won the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and was shortlisted for the Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the best book in Africana religions.

RSVP at duke.is/CCDGB-F2024.