12 Min Read
January 28, 2025
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Rachel Webb Jekanowski is an Assistant Professor at Memorial University's Grenfell Campus who researches connections between moving images, energy cultures, and environments. Giulia Champion is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton who works on ocean and seabed governance and justice and deep-sea mining. Mikala Hope-Franklyn is a PhD student in the Transdisciplinary Sustainability Program at Memorial University's Grenfell Campus.
As climate change accelerates, energy transitions will be necessary, but these are not guaranteed to be “just.” Indeed, understanding what fairness and justice might mean in these contexts requires new ways of exploring the structural and systemic inequalities at the base of energy regimes and contemporary world systems.
The Gothic is a cultural genre engaged with representations of hauntings, trauma, and the uncanny that first emerged during the Victorian era (preceding horror). It explores how the repressed returns in different material or spectral forms.1 Literary and cultural scholars interested in the Gothic argue that it offers a means of working through intense social changes related to modernity, race, gender and sexuality, colonialism, and environmental crisis. Gothic tropes such as monstrosity, the uncanny, and hauntings can be read as expressions of social anxieties and values–or as a knowing riposte to oppression by postcolonial, queer, feminist, and Indigenous authors. The Gothic can also be understood as a form of speculative fiction in that it engages in “the speculative mode of the ‘What if?’” similar to genres like fantasy, horror, and historical fiction.2
The Gothic thus offers a lens to analyze energy transition and petrocultural narratives, revealing how racial and colonial injustices manifest in and through them. For instance, Sharae Deckard theorizes the “extractive Gothic,” which is “preoccupied with energy at the point of extraction.”3 The extractive Gothic turns on tropes of drills and dredges, and its plots often hinge on the terrifying consequences of delving too deep: of unearthing monsters from beneath,; excavating horrifying substances that pollute the topside,; or triggering the uncanny fusing of oil and coal into massified bodies and sentient matter.4 For energy humanities scholars, the Gothic can therefore be an important analytical tool for unearthing the silences and repressed dynamics of energy transition narratives.
Like other forms of speculative fiction, Gothic tropes, and narratives are not limited to popular media and documentary representations of energy–they also emerge within the policy realm. Imaginaries of clean energy and green transitions away from fossil fuels are forged and honed by policymakers, industry representatives, activists, and community stakeholders. Our thinking is shaped by Nandita Badami, who argues that policy documents about energy infrastructures (such as maps and reports) can be read as “speculative literature in themselves.”5
Analyzing seemingly nonfiction texts like energy policy and public discourse through the Gothic can facilitate more critical and nuanced understandings of the way that power, discourse, and imaginaries shape political decision-making. This includes how techno-determinism and settler land politics shape the futures being projected and communicated through government energy policy in Canada, the United States, and globally.
To test some of these ideas, we crafted a collaborative storytelling role-playing game (RPG) for our panel at the 17th Biennial International Gothic Association (IGA) Conference at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Organized by Professor Karen Macfarlane and supported by a host of student assistants, the IGA explored the Gothic as a genre, collection of aesthetics, and set of creative practices in all its global manifestations. Our panel considered the uneven experiences and future imaginaries of energy transitions through examples of Gothic and speculative narratives from three island contexts: Newfoundland (Canada), Barbados, and Shetland (United Kingdom). The first half of our panel considered papers exploring how these narratives expressed societal and cultural responses to the climate crisis and possible green energy solutions. In its second half, we ran our RPG attendees in the room to explore how this scenario could inspire us to think differently about future energy regimes. We hypothesized that this format of interactive storytelling might unearth and identify repressed energy anxieties and imaginaries. In other words, the RGP could be used to playfully unleash the Gothic within transition narratives in both the tensions that emerge and our methods of analysing them.
The Gothic offers a lens to analyze energy transition narratives, revealing how racial and colonial injustices manifest in and through them.
Our collaborative storytelling exercise proposed a fictional scenario of a small island community facing a proposed onshore “green” energy development that promises local employment as well as significant social, cultural, and political changes. The scenario begins as follows:
“You are residents of an island coastal community. A multinational corporation has proposed constructing a large onshore renewable energy development (solar/wind/ hydrogen) about thirty minutes from your community. The proponent has pitched this project as an important step forward in the fight against climate change by producing green energy to transition away from fossil fuels.”
After outlining the island community’s characteristics (e.g., the town is “culturally vibrant,” with “a natural deep-water port” and eroding coastlines from increasingly severe storms), the scenario concludes:
“A town hall is being planned as part of the mandated community consultations. Representatives from the municipality, the energy company, and the community’s civil society will be present. You have been asked to prepare and present your position on this green energy project at the town hall. What will you say? How might this energy development help or hinder the pursuit of a more just future?”
We had no influence or choice over who decided to join us. We distributed “position cards” to divide attendees into three role-playing groups: civil society, local government, and the renewable energy company.
Each position card had discussion prompts to guide how the groups developed their priorities and goals concerning a “just transition” for a mock town hall discussion. Participants were tasked with making decisions in the RPG through a justice-based lens while balancing their group’s interests. Each group was given sticky notes, markers, and paper to note their thoughts and prepare their interventions. After workshopping their speaking points, the groups presented their position to the town hall, moderated by Rachel Jekanowski. Participants then briefly responded to each other before the moderator invited them to reflect on their attempts to enact justice and debrief their experiences during the activity. By adopting the interactive format of a role-playing game, we sought to invite attendees to become participants in knowledge creation by engaging with co-creation and storytelling as tools for imagining energy justice.
In the town hall, the corporate proponents conjured a large-scale wind development named Eagle Winds, with their spokesperson performing the role of a benevolent, socially-conscious corporate leader with aplomb. The group roleplaying the municipal government spoke up for the community’s interests, presenting themselves as “resource stewards” responsible for cultivating human and nonhuman resources alike. Their pitch was accompanied by colorful illustrations referencing Gothic tropes and slogans inspired by leftist social movements. Civil society pushed back, voicing concern about empty promises and questions that need answers as to the ecological and social scale of the project: will it undermine the island’s culture or risk community safety with worker camps?
While the design of the activity was not explicitly Gothic, the Gothic emerged through participants’ responses. Some playfully interpreted the activity as an opportunity to incorporate weird figures, solarpunk, and eco-Gothic tropes. Others drew on their work with Haunted Shores, which explores coasts and littoral spaces within the Gothic, fantasy, and horror. As facilitators, we approached the exercise as a space to explore how the Gothic mediates social responses to large-scale transitions, including fear, nostalgia, anxiety, and anticipation.
A key insight that emerged from the exercise was how the Gothic allowed us to read energy, not just in terms of energy transition narratives, but also the “energies” in the room. In other words, the Gothic served as our lens for analyzing both how participants imagined a just transition within the RPG and the emergent “energies” in the room. The first instance of this was how participants’ lived experiences and ideas of rurality informed how they interpreted the scenario and, by extension, ideas of a just transition. For instance, some participants interpreted the position card description of the coastal community as “culturally vibrant” as referring to the arts. Their imagined community consisted of a heterogeneous mix of artistic newcomers and rural inhabitants whose families had been there for generations. Colonialism and indigeneity did not emerge in these discussions, however, despite the conference’s location in traditional Mi’kmaw territory and our opening research presentations. Mikala Hope-Franklyn’s talk, in particular, traced how colonialism operates as a crucial structure in past, present, and future energy regimes. This disconnect between the imaginary of who inhabits island communities created in the RPG and the settler colonial context of the conference may reflect the lived experiences of white Euro-American academics who comprised the majority of the conference attendees. Further, as Ruth Panelli and her co-authors show, rurality in settler colonies is often conflated with whiteness and the absence of ethnic diversity.6 Energy interventions were seen as an imposition on white rural communities–represented by hulking technologies and migrant workforces entering these spaces and impacting established ways of life.
Energy transition discourse in the global North, according to Christos Zografos, often obscures the colonial underpinning of extractive histories and “assumptions of race and social difference” that persist within proposals for “green” energy developments.7 Promises of climate justice cannot be easily squared with the risks of creating neo-colonial “green sacrifice” or “extraction zones” through the location of these large-scale developments in Indigenous traditional territories and formerly colonised countries.8 This also does not take into account the mining sites for the needed metals and rare earth minerals used in renewable energy technologies.
Approaching the Gothic as a praxis enables us to unveil what remains repressed yet structures our lives in the late capitalist energy regimes in which we exist. The genre emerged as Europe consumed the world to reach political and economic expansion. It is both a product of colonialism and, as Rebecca Duncan reminds us, a response to Western modernity and colonial extractivism.9 When applied to narratives about energy, the Gothic can be used to identify how coloniality and extractivism haunt ideas of energy transition. As we observed in this collaborative storytelling exercise, ideas of rural whiteness and the erasure of coloniality were the substructure to participants’ discussion about whether to support the fictional renewable energy project and what constituted “justice” for an island community. Analysing the “energies in the room” through this lens reveals the structural inequalities and social operations of power within current and future energy systems.
The scenario and position cards for our storytelling activity can be downloaded here. They are available for public use under a Creative Commons license.
Notes
1. David Punter, “Introduction: The Ghost of a History,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden, 2012), 1-9.
2. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham and London), 2018.
3. Henry 2019: 406.
4. Sharae Deckard, “Extractive Gothic,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Globalgothic, ed. Rebecca Duncan (Edinburgh, 2023), 131-47.
5. Nandita Badami, “Solarpunking Speculative Futures,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Dec. 18, 2018, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/solarpunking-speculative-futures.
6. Ruth Panelli, et al., “De-centring White ruralities: Ethnic diversity, racialisation, and Indigenous countrysides,” Journal of Rural Studies 25, no. 4 (2009): 355–64, https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/de-centring-white-ruralities-ethnic-diversity-racialisation-and-i
7. Christos Zografos, “The Contradictions of Green New Deals: Green Sacrifice and Colonialism,” Soundings: A journal of politics and culture 80 (2022): 37-50, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/856495.
8. Macarena Gomez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, 2017); Dayna N. Scott and Adrian A. Smith, “‘Sacrifice Zones’ in the Green Energy Economy: Toward an Environmental Justice Framework,” McGill Law Journal — Revue de Droit de McGill 62, no. 3 (2017): 861–98, https://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/article/sacrifice-zones-in-the-green-energy-economy-toward-an-environmental-justice-framework/
9. Rebecca Duncan, “Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies,” Gothic Studies 24, no. 3 (2022): 304–22, https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0144open_in_new; Rebecca Duncan, “World-Gothic in Theory.” Conference Presentation presented at Gothic Trans/Iterations: The 2024 International Gothic Association Conference, Halifax, August 1, 2024.
