1 That the latter use (as a source of energy) came *after* the first (the bomb) is a function of applicable research funding—the military had the resources—as much, perhaps, as anything else (cf. e.g., Flisfeder or Solnit 108–144). The accumulations, as will become clear, are both the kind that will require storage (cf. e.g., Ialenti) or that are stored in the body (cf. Hecht or Williams).

Bethesda Softworks' *Fallout 4* from 2015. The game employs an aesthetic that externalizes risk in temporal terms, that valorizes technological fixes, and at the same time—somewhat paradoxically—implies that nuclear fallout is containable. The marginalization of risk—historically and still today relegated to colonies —is now and has always been relegated to the future. Despite the best attempts at containment and relegation, nuclear technologies and interventions always have worked to collapse sovereignty, spatial regimes of power and even time, and continue to do so today.

#### **Absent Presents, Absent Presences: Elsewhere & Elsewhen**

Extractive relations are present in all manner of (material) relations. For Macarena Gómez-Barris, "the extractive global economy" is the system "installed by colonial capitalism in the 1500s and that converted natural resources such as silver, water, timber, rubber, and petroleum into global commodities" (xvi). In the Américas, according to Gómez-Barris, extractivism is embroiled in capitalism and colonialism, that is, in "thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories" (xvii). Whilst in the context of the Américas (and elsewhere), extraction is intricately connected to capitalism and is imbricated in histories of enslaving people, extractivist mindsets also gird non-capitalist relations, as the example of nuclear entanglements in the former U.S.S.R. illustrate (see the work of Kate Brown for more on this, in particular *Plutopia*).

Nuclear energy relies on specific raw materials, quite literally extracted from the earth, as well as on the extractions figured through complex enrichment projects, through sustained experimentation, and, of course, on human labor. For Anaïs Maurer and Rebecca H. Hogue, the extractive relations of nuclear energy are not unrelated to others: "If you live in the United States," they write, "there is a one in five probability that your light is powered by uranium mined on stolen Indigenous land in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Russia, and the continental United States" (29). The extractive relations do not end there, however. Extraction, in nuclear relations, is not simply the removal of minerals—for example uranium—from lands around the world. It is also evident in what is normally called 'tests' and 'test-sites.' As Solnit reminds us, the U.S. Department of Energy also lists the explosions above Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tests (138–39). Whilst Solnit prefers the term 'rehearsals' to suggest that they "were full-scale explosions in the real world, with all the attendant effects" (5), to emphasize cumulative approximation of war, I think 'detonations' might better stress the explosive and material dimensions of these acts.

Maurer and Hogue also note that the first five countries to develop atomic bombs *all* undertook initial detonations ('tests') on indigenous land, and, crucially, recognize that this constitutes placing indigenous peoples under attack (31–32). "Unlike other forms of imperialism," they argue, "nuclear imperialisms are not only interested in occupying another given territory simply to exploit its resources or merely to pollute it. They annihilate their chosen sites of empire" (33). One of their interlocutors in that piece, antinuclear activist Chantal T. Spitz, presses this point with more urgency: "Nuclear countries do not develop and experiment their weapons of death on their own soils but on their colonies' soils. Nuclear is happening because colonies exist" (qtd. in Maurer/ Hogue 26). Sometimes these colonies are far away, sometimes much closer; sometimes they are explicit colonies, sometimes they are unceded lands.

Consequently, nuclear relations do not pattern evenly across the globe (although the Pacific [Rim] figures prominently). Isao Hashimoto's video "Timelapse Map of All 2053 Nuclear Explosions 1945—1998" uses pared down computer generated images to map the detonations through this time period and across the globe. After the initial detonations in Japan, the scale shifts to include the entirety of the globe. Each nuclear 'player'—and the aesthetics are more than a little reminiscent of early computer games—is given a different color upon 'entry' to the 'game,' and the acceleration of detonations proceeds. Minor lapses in intensity of detonations following international treaties (e.g., around 1958) become evident, visually and sonically, by contrast to the accumulation of color and noise that otherwise accompanies each detonation.Through the use of color, the relations between the respective nuclear powers and their preferred sites of detonation are rendered more visible, as is the case with Peter Atwood's static image ("Nuclear Detonations 1945–2019"). The colonial relations2 that gird these detonation structures would come into their own if the centers of each power were specifically mapped alongside with the use of color to map in the respective empires.

2 Both Hashimoto and Atwood employ pink to represent the United Kingdom's detonations and thus reference the relations of empire by taking advantage of that particular color reference.

Mapping the testing sites across an (imagined) background of relations of empire then emerges as an extended exercise in mapping colonialism: Kazakhstan's relations to the Soviet Union come to echo Australia's relations to the U.K., and also what New Mexico (and, later, the Marshall Islands) were and continue to be to the U.S. and what Algeria and Polynesia were and continue to be to France. Each of these relations depicts in and of itself a center-periphery relation. Most critically, imagined atop a map of empire, the detonations are far away from their respective centers of power. The risk—the fallout3—of detonations is played down and literally marginalized by being staged on the (respective) geographical margins of the so-called first world. To be sure, these margins are, for other people(s), livelihoods and ancestral lands, not marginal at all.

This marginalization of risk is concomitant with an externalization of resource extraction and other exploitative practices. Several terms have been developed to trace this idea. Georg Borgström's "ghost acreage" points to the externalized lands (and, by extension, lives) that feed the wealthy; Kenneth Pomeranz similarly explores the idea of "ghost acres" and "ghost acreage" as an extractive relation emerging with industrialization (275–83). Borgström's and Pomeranz' terms emerge in thinking about the production of food, with some peoples of the present profiting from other peoples' present lack. Val Plumwood proposes the term 'shadow places' for thinking through the "*material conditions (including ecological conditions) that support or enable our lives*" (her italics), which, she argues, the valorization of place has often neglected to consider: "An ecological re-conception of dwelling has to include a justice perspective and be able to recognise the shadow places, not just the ones we love, admire or find nice to look at" (n. p.). Stefan Lessenich, in the *Externalisierungsgesellschaft* (externalization society, analog, perhaps, to Ulrich Beck's *Risikogesellschaft* which has been translated as risk society), makes a similar point: He observes that to be 'doing well,' one is 'doing above average,' and that this necessarily entails that there are others who are 'doing below average' (cf. e.g., 24). Of particular interest for this essay is the way he evokes a temporal dimension (as well as the spatial externalization common to the above-mentioned critics):

3 Joseph Masco, in *The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making*, asserts: "Attending to fallout draws attention to emerging forms of violence across the Global North and South divide while challenging the temporal logics of settler colonialism and postcoloniality" (Masco 18).

In this conjunction [intergenerational equity/justice], we find the evocation of 'our children and children's children' in whose interest we forego nuclear power (at the same time as offering energy monopolists compensation), we limit our individual travel (at the same time as exporting more cars), and amortize debt (at the same time as exploiting the social assets of the classes who otherwise own nothing). (30, translation mine)4

The appeal to 'our children and children's children,' even if Lessenich distances himself from it, invokes a prevalent form of sentimentality.5

The nuclear collapses simple relations of externalization:Whilst the testing is pushed*outwards*to the boundaries for the technocrats of the respectiveimperial powers, this is not the direction of the radioactive interference in bodies. In *Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor*, Rob Nixon notes that "[c]hemical and radiological violence, for example, is driven *inwards*, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation that—particularly in the bodies of the poor—remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated" (6, my emphasis). In "Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene," Gabrielle Hecht similarly notes the difficulties for Gabonese laborers in acquiring diagnosis, medical attention, or compensation (even as French laborers were able to), compounded by the lack of knowledge of the 'baseline' exposure in the Oklo uranium mine. Here, too, the effects are marginalized through the politics of the colony.  (Lessenich 30)

5 Interpellations to think of the coming generations such as this are often articulated in this particular way—that is, invoking children and grandchildren. As Naomi Klein points out in "The Right to Regenerate" (in *This Changes Everything*), her personal experiences with fertility issues led to resistance to these kinds of invocations: "[I]f I was going through a particularly difficult infertility episode, just showing up to a gathering of environmentalists could be an emotional minefield. The worst part were the ceaseless invocations of our responsibilities to 'our children' and 'our grandchildren.' […] [W]here did that leave those of us who did not, or could not, have children? Was it even possible to be a real environmentalist if you didn't have kids?" (423)

In such cases, the inhabitants are rendered 'uninhabitants.' This is a term that Robert Nixon finds in Rebecca Solnit, and that Solnit draws from an interview with Janet Gordon (Nixon; Solnit, especially 154–55), predated, amongst others, by Terry Tempest Williams in her memoir *Refuge* (287). The term derived from the phrase "virtually uninhabited," which of course means that the lands *are* inhabited: The near-negative relation is tenuous, resting on the qualifier 'virtually.' The fallout—which, following Joseph Masco is inherent in the systems which give rise to it (i.e., it is not accidental), and which "formally links human actions, technological capabilities, atmospheres, and ecologies in a new configuration of contamination" (Masco 20)—produces instabilities. Cellular volatilities giving rise to cancer; intergenerational volatilities leading to infertilities and genetic variations; all in excess of baseline rates.

Nuclear imperialisms are not just *simply* extractive; they are also annihilative. And this extends, crucially, to thinking about extraction as it extends into the future. Masco brings the multiple valencies of the term 'fallout' to think about the future dimensions of nuclear entanglements. Fallout, he writes, is a term which "involvesindividual actions and lived consequences" thatis "understood primarily retrospectively but lived in the future anterior" because, most crucially, "[f]allout comes after the event" designating "an unexpected supplement to an event, a precipitation that is in motion, causing a kind of long-term and unexpected damage"(19).Masco couples nuclear weapons with climate destruction—twinned threats that play out keenly in the (nuclear) Pacific (see for instance DeLoughrey)—as "industrially manufactured problems that […] colonize the future" (5).

At the same 'time': The duration of nuclear detonations itself (barely) occupies a relation to experienced time. As Masco argues, "all the nuclear detonations in human history—the 2,100 or so nuclear events that constitute an unprecedented human intervention into the biosphere, remaking both geological and human time—do not collectively add up to a single second of linear time" (285). This folding of extensive durations of fallout into events of such short duration that we might barely register them is also a recognition that relations of time and space are complicated by nuclear energy, as the quantum physics upon which nuclear entanglements are based might already suggest (cf. also Barad).

Cheryll Glotfelty, amongst others, has accordingly suggested that the aftereffects of nuclear detonations have been purposefully relegated to the future: "As the United States invested in nuclear power, little thought was given to what to do with the radioactive waste produced as a by-product of nuclear fission, the assumption being that new technology would arise to deal with the waste" (198).The reliance on a speculative, future technological fix is one that is not particular to nuclear incursions: Similar examples include geo-engineering fixes for climate change; faith in plastic-eating bacteria for plastic waste;6 and, for most of the West, the narration of the early stages of the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic as a 'waiting-for-the-vaccine,' where the possibility of a vaccine was a *given*. As energy safety enters the political climate of Europe in 2022, and in a political climate given to considerations of climate *change* in other places (e.g., in Australia, with respect to coal extraction regimes), the future dimension of nuclear energies is somehow, again, conveniently bracketed out of considerations. Nuclear power(s) extract(s) not only from the 'ghost acres' or 'shadow places,' those marginalized places; its externalization is not only spatial but is, crucially, temporal. The elsewhere of nuclear power(s) thus becomes also an 'elsewhen.'

#### **Mediating Futures in** *Fallout 4*

This 'elsewhen'of nuclear extractionis projected onto the future.AsMaurer and Hogue observe, "mainstream nuclear discourse has predominantly been interested in the future—specifically, a speculative, totalizing future dependent on the existence of nuclear war" (27). The future imagined in *Fallout 4*, indeed, in all of the games that comprise the *Fallout* series, which I now address, is predicated on a hollowing out of the nuclear present, and dependent on extractions from other times and places.

Attending to the future requires imagination. Our repertoires for the future are images in the speculative mode. This is the remit of SF, of postapocalyptic, utopian/dystopian, fantasy and other narratives and cultural artifacts that depart from more realist modes, of which computer games (set in the future) are one. Particularly the narrative and dramatic moments of some games establish relations to the future by explicitly telling and staging the story; the use of graphic representation and sound tracks embed these imaginations in representative forms; and the role of the player acts as a bridge between the

6 As Max Liboiron points out, plastic-eating bacteria would also eat the plastic we find useful: the buttons on my computer and my glasses, or as they suggest "the plastics in bridges, airplanes, automobiles, pacemakers, and buildings. Everyday infrastructure would be crumbling around us, like a B horror movie" (103).

imaginary worlds represented, especially in the reception of shooter games in broader media contexts, troubles any easy distinction between the social intraand inter-game worlds.

*Fallout 4*, released in 2015, is the fourth release in Bethesda Softworks' *Fallout* series. To date,it is the most recent release in the main titles segment of the *Fallout* line, though some spin-offs have been launched in the meantime. *Fallout 4* is primarily set around 200 years after a set of nuclear detonations have blasted the world. The player adopts an avatar who can partake in a number of quests—ostensibly to rescue their kidnapped son7—and/or can play around in the postapocalyptic landscape around Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

*Fallout 4* came to my attention in a seminar on Nuclear Cultures when a student recognized some of the tracks from the soundtrack to *The Atomic Café* (1982), which we discussed in class, as being also used in the computer game. We watched a short advertisement for the game in class: The proto-utopian hope of 1950s U.S. nuclear culture portrayedin some of the historical sequences of the documentary film mapped in interesting ways onto the world of the game. In addition to the soundtrack, the architectural and interior design of the computer game referenced, with little interference, the design choices of the 1950s in the U.S.A. (and elsewhere). Housing and domestic scenes of the game, as well as the billboard and other advertisements, seemed to be sutured with the postapocalyptic landscape, a kind of *The Truman Show* meets *I am Legend*, with sentimental overtones—as the trope of the kidnapped child might suggest. The documentary works through cognitive distancing and cognitive dissonance by, for instance, showing footage of Marshallese singing "You Are My Sunshine" just before showing footage of the bomb being dropped (a 'test'). In the game, such distancing emerges in the temporal marginalizations—at once referencing a past known to most of us8 only through media and a future we cannot know.

The media used on the TV in the opening sequences of *Fallout 4* to tell stories that are, for most of us,most of the time, always medialized and mediated: war, testing, bombs, etc. For most of us, most of the time, these things happen elsewhere.The TV set that brings news of impending nuclear attack in the game acts as a portal and as a buffer. It transports images and sounds from faraway places, and, in doing so, seeks to contain these to the images and sounds

7 I am of the understanding that players can select the gender—binary—of their avatar and use the pronoun 'they' and derivatives to reflect this.

8 Well: to all of us in that particular seminar.

presented on the set. The TV set reporting in *Fallout 4* as well as the radio announcements initially suggest the distance to the threat, and, if/when this no longer holds, its contain-ability. DeLoughrey uses the term 'isolate' to do this work, where she argues "[t]he concept of the closed system or isolate was tied closely to the colonization of islands and render[ed] them into nuclear laboratories" (172).

Contain-ability, or the 'isolate,' is a premise articulated in the opening sequences of the game, specifically through the figure of the vault salesman. A vault promises security, or at least storage (usually of things; in the game this is the body). In *Fallout 4*, this promise is only partially upheld, for the vault is breached by 'Institute' members who kidnap the protagonist's baby and kill their spouse, a sequence the protagonist is awake for but unable, for a time, to fully comprehend. The narrative of the game play is thus motivated by the sentimental topos of child separation. For Lauren Berlant, there is a particular "history of sentimentality around children that sees them as the reason to have optimism—for if nothing else, their lives are not already ruined" (171). The latter comes into its own when, later in game play, the reasoning for the capture is given: to retrieve the unspoiled DNA of the child (with the protagonist acting as a back-up repository in case of mistakes). So, whilst the vault protects the protagonist (and their family) from the effects of nuclear fallout, it is precisely this protection which renders them more vulnerable to biopiracy. Complete security, it seems, is a myth based on a faulty comprehension of containment. Against this—tenuous—premise, the world unfolds 200 years later, when the avatar is unfrozen from their 200-year hiatus.

It is possible to play *Fallout 4* by mucking around as a scavenger in a postapocalyptic future, or as, Megan Condis suggests with reference to *Mad Max* and *The Last Man on Earth*, as part of an "escapist fantas[y] about what it would be like to be entirely free of responsibility for each other, for society, for the planet" (187): The final consequences of misbehavior have already come to be—the apocalypse has come and gone. Thinking about the game in this sense is to entertain a dystopian fragmentation, where the destruction of the nuclear family through the nuclear threat ultimately sets the avatar into a world deplete of meaningful relations. However, this interpretation of the game rests, as Condis suggests, on ignoring the narrative arc. The extent to which this is upheld—by, for instance, forgoing the opportunity to collaborate with other characters of the postnuclear landscape in establishing (wait for it…) *settlements* replete with agricultural projects and energy producing machines—is the extent to which this world is purely a survival in the leftovers

of a previous time. This kind of scavenging is a dwelling in and living through the waste of a previous time, without means of production. The absence of cooperation means the absence of production, rendering the avatar's play an entirely scavenged existence (not unlike the perpetual motion of the figures in Cormac McCarthy's *The Road*, or the TV series *The Walking Dead*), subsiding off the past's waste, in a wasted land.

#### **Past Imaginings of the Future and Future Reconfigurations of the Past**

As already mentioned, the soundtrack draws on bebop hits like "Atom Bomb Baby," songs of the kind that rhyme bomb with wigwam (exoticism leaning toward racism) or describe women in terms of their hotness (not too different to the lyrics of today, though this hotness is radioactive). At the same time, the visuals recollect the buildings built to test nuclear destruction in the region of Nevada, though transplanted to the normally more verdant northeastern region of the U.S. The 'return' to the 1950s is troubled, though, by other aesthetic/worlding decisions.

In the opening sequences of *Fallout 4*, the player is introduced to the prelapsarian world, a suburban setting of the nuclear family (cf. Flisfeder), replete with robot-butler Codsworth. Codsworth speaks with a decidedly English accent, thus seemingly enacting a strange nostalgia for imperial relations, imagined in a sentimental manner that paints Codsworth as a subservient and caring servant. Codsworth, further, acts as a micro case study in what might best be called 'retro-futurism,' for the robot looks much like what I (today) imagine people of the 1950s might have imagined future robots to look like: a looping of temporal imaginings that side-steps the present (except as the time of reception). Codsworth is not the only instance of "content that highlights nostalgia, irony, and time-bending dislocation" (434) as Elizabeth Guffey and Kate C. Lemay define retrofuturism. The above mentioned suburb, as well as large mainframe computers in the vault and other locations, gas stations or truck stops called "Red Rocket" replete with large signs,9 even the power armor, similarly seem to recollect bygone imaginations of the future. Indeed, the premise of the quest—cyrogenetic freezing in a safely contained vault unaffected by

9 The symbolism somehow also seems to fold Elon Musk's and Richard Branson's fantastical space travel into the fossil fueled futurism of the 1950s.

broadscale societal and environmental collapse—might be more representative of a past speculative future than most imaginations of the future from the mid-2010s (when the game was released) or the early 2020s (when I am writing this piece).

In this, the game engages in a lengthy displacement of the immediate past of the game world to a more distanced future. As Joe P. L. Davidson has argued of science fiction film,

Retrofuturism […] refers to the conscious use of a repertoire of images of technology, architecture and design, as well as intertextual references to other cultural artefacts, that are indexed in the cultural imaginary to the futurism of the mid-twentieth century with the aim of reinterpreting, recontextualizing and reworking the meaning of yesterday's tomorrows in the present. (731)

In the context of a game that plays out in a nuclear (past-)future, this has, I argue, the effect of hollowing out the (gameplay) present. The nuclear threat is configured as a *past* potential future, which may have comeinto being in the future depicted by the game world, but that necessarily and absolutely bypasses the present.

Aside from the renditions of the robot-butler Codsworth,of material goods (like houses, furniture, even food packaging, and posters), and the incorporation of a 'matching' soundtrack, a similar gesture of historical reconfiguration is evident on a different level of the game, namely the groups with which the player can affiliate the avatar to complete quests. Megan Condis gives a succinct summary of the directed or narrative gameplay storylines of *Fallout 4* in her review:

the player [is supposed to] choose between four possible sets of allies to guide the future of the Wasteland: the Institute, who use their futuristic technology to hide underground and who have developed (and enslaved) a robot army to do their bidding in the world above; the Railroad, a ragtag group of spies dedicated to freeing synthetic humans from the clutches of the Institute; the Minutemen, an alliance of small settlements providing safe haven and protection for residents of the area; and the Brotherhood of Steel, a militaristic group who are obsessed with gathering up and hoarding all the weaponry from the world that was. To complete the game, the player must choose a faction to align with and become its leader, working to fulfil its chosen mission, all while seeking the whereabouts of your kidnapped son. (185)

This is ultimately another, important, way in which historical context is (awkwardly!) folded into the ludic present of *Fallout 4*, itself set in a potential future.

Samuel McCready gives two of these groups (the Minutemen and the Brotherhood) more attention in his account, noting the conflict between the two versions of understanding the world are essentially mutually exclusive. McCready thus reads the imaginations of these groups as demonstrating the contingency of historical accounts of the U.S. more broadly: The speculative future draws on specific understandings of the past, somehow nearly entirely bypassing the present. An insistence on teleology is present in the inclusion of both groups, and, at the same time, as McCready points out, "there is no [United States of] America to salvage, for either group" (30).10 The counterfactual imaginary at work in *Fallout 4* in the re-imagination of past historical factions reconfigures sets of people from the Civil War to consolidate a sense of U.S. exceptionalism, proliferating a particularly U.S. American version of history by resuscitating it.This aspect of the game insists on the persistence of specifically U.S. American histories that continue to inhabit the post-apocalyptic worlds, suggesting—simultaneously and also counter-intuitively—that these myths, in particular of U.S. exceptionalism, are hardy enough to literally survive the end of the world.

The Minutemen, aside from referencing the New England colonial militia that went by this name, are the group most invested in topside settlement (the Institute, another group, shifts underground).11 Missions with, and for, this group often entail the construction of housing, farm plots, and securing settlements.The relation to the nuclear embodied by this group is a reiteration of settler myths, now set in the distant future, or as Masco suggests (not specifically of *Fallout 4*): "the American modernist story of self-invention via settler colonialism, the ability to always start over somewhere else, to break with the

10 "The world of *Fallout 4* challenges players to think about what has led them here to this nuclear hellscape; this includes considering how it is that myths of progress that so often get written into history actively contributed in making a future that was less stable (and ultimately decimated) precisely because it was ideologically monolithic" (McCready 31).

11 The name might also evoke the Minuteman Project—an anti-immigration group that 'watches' the Southern border. Thanks to Axelle Germanaz for pointing this out.

past and begin anew, to escape fallout by simply relocating to a newly exciting frontier" (39).

The Brotherhood, another group, seems to be a thinly veiled metaphor for the military-industrial complex; convinced that controlling technology and stockpiling weaponry is key to domination. In a game like this, complete domination is desirable (and how you win); and destruction is a tool towards this. Affiliating with this group means dissociating from the violent premise of the game, with its near-complete destruction of the world. It requires a selectively edited understanding of history to pursue affiliation with this group with the goal of completing the game, as their goals perpetuate the problems that the story is predicated on. The violence of the past (and future?) is met with more violence. This storyline thus awkwardly echoes many of the dissonances that characterize living in a post-colonial world in the Anthropocene, entailing the capacity to ignore the externalizations of risk outlined earlier as well as the long-term consequences of material engagements with the world in favor of living the present.

The Railroad, even in their denomination, recollect the history of people working to redress the horrors of slavery, that is, the Underground Railroad. In *Fallout 4,* racial politics give way to species considerations, bringing cyborg or posthumanist thought to the kinds of politics that are entailed in histories of exclusion, domination, and exploitation.This group's aim is to free the Synths, synthesized humans 'grown' by the Institute from the DNA of the avatar's son, and who are kept as slaves. When Synths develop (too much) free will they are subject to a radical restart, a kind of social death; the Railroad seeks to help them to freedom.

The Institute is more amorphous, and at the same time the most retrofuturistic of the groups, with the architectural and fashion choices of this faction referencing (historical) science fiction films and/or futuristic spy movies, with some fans pointing to *Forbidden Planet* (1956) and others to *2001: A Space Odysee* (1968) to trace potential influences. The sometimes 'wooden' dialogue seems, in these sequences, to be deliberately on point, a caricature of the kind of films that portray long-gone versions of by-now outdated futures. The Institute has a much cleaner aesthetic than the desolate ruins 'topside': lots of white, clean lines, sweeping staircases, sleek elevators, and verdant plants. Its retro-futurism is clinical rather than ruinous, underscoring the divides between the cultural and physical worlds the different groups of the game inhabit.

At the same time, the ravaged topside world suggests there are limits to this exceptionalism. Pointing out the insertion of imagined bygone advertisements and billboards into the landscape of postnuclear destruction, McCready argues that "juxtaposition of happy consumer culture with total annihilation serves as its own critique of the kinds of excess that are at least in part responsible for the destruction that has been wrought" (25). For McCready, the counterfactual premise of *Fallout 4* reveals, amongst other things, the shortcomings of consumer culture to buttress individuals against destruction. The image he includes in his article "Playing the Past and Alternative Futures" shows a dull and rusting vending machine with two bright posters plastered on it, next to a "moldy box of illegible files" (25) and a fully articulated human skeleton.12 *Fallout 4*, he argues, "reveals the tenuousness of the historical trajectory that proceeded from that mid-century moment until the present in its own altered futurescape, and makes a powerful claim against totalizing and revisionist attempts to reconstruct an ordered version of events" (26). In my interpretation, I turn to the very specific ways in which the phrase "the present in its own altered futurescape" (ibid.) skips over the player's present: the ways in which the game recognizes and represents the almost entirely absent presence of nuclear threat. Almost entirely, because one of the detonations is indeed shown, though its duration is comparable, if not shorter, than the countdown presented soon after that accompanies the avatar into their cyrogenetic freeze. Both are a-temporal events compressing radical interventions into the future's liveability (collectively, individually) into a manner of seconds, in a link back to Masco's observation about the accumulative duration of all nuclear detonations.

#### **A Brief Conclusion**

*Fallout 4* excavates the present and all kinds of presences to locate 'the' nuclear in the past,in the future,in the past's imagination of the future… anywhere but the here and now. In doing so, the game replicates fantasies of contain-ability;

12 The existence of fully articulated human skeletons and skeletal trees bereft of signs of life are not necessarily fanciful; they can be seen as indicative of the extent to which the critters that usually do the work of decomposition are not compatible with high levels of radiation. Kate Brown observes some scientists working in the larger region of Chernobyl as theorizing that "microbes, worms, larvae, and insects that normally break down organic matter were unable to work well in high levels of contamination (over 50 microsieverts)." (205)

not a strong claim for a game predicated on the existence of a vault impermeable to nuclear fallout but not, it seems, so foreign to the military-industrial complex that probably built it in the first place. With its sentimental cues to the nuclear family (locating the kidnapped son is crucial to the narrative, particularly at the outset), and the 'innocent' aesthetics of the 1950s, both in the 'simply retro' and the retro-futuristic modes, the locus of the avatar is cushioned against the ravages of the world. And, yes, games tend to do this: We can, after all, repeatedly save gameplay and resume before some catastrophic decision or unforeseen consequence.This cushioning is, however, clearly predicated on an externalization of risk and, crucially, an extraction *from* the future. The liveability of the future is irrevocably based on our capacity to act ethically towards human, cyborg, and other livelihoods, both of our present and not.

The extent to which the liveability of 'our' current lives is also the un-liveability of other's current lives, and many people's future lives, is one of nuclear culture's entanglements in the present. Debates about energy crises have brought attention back to nuclear power. In Germany, this is a debate that also arises from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with its various impacts on energy policy: A center (Russia) seeking to reassert itself in a (former) periphery (Ukraine) is not a speculative meandering around past problems, but transforms into a debate about the sustainability of energy production.The re-entry of Chernobyl to medialized debates concerning the potential weaponization of nuclear facilities, along with the reactors at the Zaporizhzhia plant, alarmingly show how tenuous the stability of nuclear generation can be. And, in France, the drying up of the Loire River in the summer of 2022 has been met with concern: The river and its tributaries provide water for the cooling of several nuclear facilities producing electricity (cf. Crellin). Lines of argumentation that render coal dirty and nuclear somehow clean neglect such very real (future) material impacts. With climate change, the future is closer than it once perhaps appeared. Nuclear energy has and continues to extract from the margins; and one of these margins is temporal: the—our—future.

#### **References**

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. *Cruel Optimism*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bethesda Softworks. 2015. *Fallout 4*.

Lawrence, Francis, dir. 2007.*I Am Legend*. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

### **"All of That Wealth Underneath": How the Logic of Extraction Blocks Discourses of Sustainability in the U.S.1**

*Heike Paul*

"[T]he physical causes […] which can lead to prosperity are more numerous in America than in any other country at any other time in history." *Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (327–28)*

"As for the garden, Adam, after the Fall. Make no mistake, he said, We will destroy it all." *Thomas King, 77 Fragments (1)*

#### **Introduction**

The dictum "land of unlimited possibilities" has been a recurring hyperbole in (self-)descriptions of the United States of America—even *avant la lettre.* The

1 This paper first appeared in 2020 in the volume *Imaginationen von Nachhaltigkeit. Katastrophe. Krise, Normalisierung*, edited by Frank Adloff, Benno Fladvad, Martina Hasenfratz, and Sighard Neckel. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 91–121.

highly praised unlimitedness either referred to notions of freedom, social mobility, economic success, or, last but not least, the seemingly endless "natural" resources, which made the former possible in the first place.2 The narrativization and iconization of this abundance of resources reaches back to the colonial beginnings of the United States. In the late 18th and early 19th century,it became a central topos in the self-image of the young nation, which further evolved in the context of the paradigm of a general settler colonialism and a specific notion of a westwardmoving *frontier*that promised landin abundance to prospective settlers. Many early texts about the United States virtually advertised this wealth and promised it to willing immigrants (cf. Crèvecoeur; Duden).

Sustainability—in the sense of taking future effects of current actions into consideration—did not only *not* play a role, but it was also literally beyond the discursive horizon, as it was in open conflict with the new republic's fundamental capitalist logics focused on property and profit. Consequently, the process of westward expansion, which rested on the expropriation and genocide of the indigenous population, was in part also marked by shortlived and resource-intensive settlement practices characteristic of "extractive colonialism," where newly founded towns were abandoned quickly when the resources were depleted or when the settlers faced better prospects for profit elsewhere.3 This is central to the early discourse on ruins in the United States, to which, for instance, a surprised Alexis de Tocqueville made the following comment during his travels, when he discovered remains of white settlements in Upstate New York: "How astonishing! Ruins already!" (328). The familiar idea of America as a big garden (Eden) (e.g., Smith 138ff.) and the vision of an agrarian ideal state obscure two aspects: on the one hand, the expansionist

2 The "land of unlimited possibilities" formula goes back to German author Max Goldberger and his book *Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten*, published in 1903. While Goldberger mainly described the economic upswing in the United States, the title of his book soon became a common saying and was applied much more broadly to different aspects of American society and history (cf. Klautke 7). Moreover, the publisher Henry Luce (135) wrote about "unlimited resources" in the context of "manifest destiny" and the "frontier."

3 The land grab by European settlers as described by so-called settler colonialism, is typically differentiated from "extractive colonialism," which is mainly concerned with the exploitation of resources. However, it is important to bear in mind that the different "types" of colonialism (Nancy Shoemaker identified 12 different ones) do not usually occur in their pure form, rather, "different forms of colonialism might coexist or morph into each other." For a history of American ghost towns see Ling.

land grab and, on the other hand, the ruthless extraction of resources (also in reference to human labor and especially the bio-politics of enslaved labor as part of an early "racialized capitalism"). Both forms of unscrupulousness indeed seem boundless in retrospect.4

Around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, after the Civil War and the "closing of the frontier," notions of unlimited growth shifted to the realms of technological and economic progress. Despite the fact that narratives of progress became increasingly contested, such ideas lived on beyond two world wars and have been revived in the postwar years as well as in more recent times—especially in political discourse. As a topic with affective appeal in election campaigns and political agendas, the fantasy of unlimited resources comes up time and time again and must be analyzed as part of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.5 In 1954, amid the economic recovery of the 1950s and at the height of the Cold War, the consensus historian David Potter—in his clearly not uncontroversial socio-psychological study—describes Americans as a "people of plenty," whose character was formed by the prosperity and abundance in the United States ("land of plenty") and whose mentality embodied the constant availability and expenditure of resources. Similarly, the European vision of the United States had, for a long time, been informed by the supposed abundance of resources—and the notion that what is needed from nature can be taken and profitably used for one's own benefit: land, humans, animals, natural resources. The logic of extraction—in part literally, in part metaphorically—underlies representations of these historical processes and developments and is perhaps more relevant at present than it has been for a long time.

It is this notion of extraction that is at the heart of the following analysis. According to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, it is "[t]he action or process of drawing (something) out of a receptacle; the pulling or taking out (of anything) by mechanical means" (*OED* Online). In the "Corpus of Contemporary American

4 Satnam Virdee analyzed in detail "the structuring force of racism in the history of capitalist modernity" (ibid. 22).

5 In the past years, this rhetoric has been employed in an exceptionally aggressive way by former president Donald Trump. Previously, Ronald Reagan had repeatedly referred to America's "unlimited resources" at the beginning of his first presidency, and even Barack Obama had promised: "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense." And even if Obama talked about having to "end the age of oil," his administration mostly conceded to the oil lobby (LeMenager 9).

English," the most frequent collocate of "extraction"—not surprisingly from today's perspective—is the word "oil" (Davies). The extraction of fossil fuels has been a focal point in U.S. history. Consequently, it does not only take center stage in economic ventures and political debates but also in cultural productions.6 American capitalism is and has always been essentially an oil capitalism, and the much-lauded "American way of life" would not be possible without it, neither with regard to consumer culture in general, nor the automobile culture in particular—the outstanding importance of oil for the military-industrial complex should also be mentioned here.7

Oil capitalism has been and continues to be in stark contrast to all ideas of ecological sustainability and resource conservation. Not least of all Donald Trump has been one of the most powerful proponents of this system: During his presidency, he embraced extraction in his energy policies on a grand scale, promoting both the revitalization of coal extraction and the controversial practice of fracking (the extraction of oil from great depths by means of injections of water and chemical substances). This way, Trump invoked—and simultaneously exploited—the U.S. "petro-imaginary,"8 which reaches as far back as the 19th century and is linked especially to those regions where Trump had his conservative voter base: Texas, for example, and Western Virginia—a predominantly rural region with a history determined by the extraction of oil and coal and which to this very day is strongly marked by the frontier-habitus. American studies scholar Donald Pease has pointed out that, during his campaign, Trump chose former "frontier sites" as rally sites to deliver his retrotopic (cf. Bauman) election promises:

6 Frederick Buell refers to the "culture of extraction" and the 19th century "oil-extraction culture," respectively (74). In doing so, he resorts to the work of Ida M. Tarbell, who associated a special kind of ruthless individualism with oil exploration and the speculation surrounding it, i.e., an "oil individualism" (75). In Tarbell, this results in a criticism of monopoly-capitalism à la Rockefeller.

7 Cf. Pease (2017, 31): "The 'American way of life' would be unimaginable without an oil economy marked by surplus production, militarism, automobility, unregulated markets, and mass consumption. Oil capitalism shaped significant turns in US national history." See also Rice and Tyner, who highlight the role of oil for American statesmanship, and Mitchell, who refers to the U.S. as a "carbon democracy."

8 The term "petro-imaginary" appears to have first been used by Georgiana Banita (151) and has since been established as a concept which, on the one hand, takes up aspects of the cultural and political imaginary and, on the other hand, addresses the specifics of oil-related imaginaries.

Trump channels this colonial settler mentality at his rallies […] A typical Trump rally site hollows a zone of indistinction between the frontier and the normal political order. At a Trump rally, followers collectively participate in the fantasy of their own regression to a state of desublimated rage at a quite literal restoration of a frontier site where these descendants of settler colonists can experience their ancestors' regeneration through violence. The frontier site a Trump rally opens up is, like the original, the not-yet bounded space on either side of the border, which is beyond clear jurisdiction. This alternative geography figures as a topological rendition of capitalist expansion beyond limits. As the primal scene of capitalist accumulation and contract, the frontier names an as yet uncolonized space upon which the processes by which the proper order of capitalist property and racialized capital gets re-installed through Trump's contract from this relentlessly nativist America (Pease 2018, 164).

This frontier scenario is a fitting match for the logic of extraction. It is also the cornerstone of Trump's campaign program, which rested in equal measure on the extraction and exploitation of resources, the explicit departure from the policies of his predecessor (even if the extraction of oil was also heavily increased under Obama, i.e., there has been no complete reversal), and the undermining of well-established political and administrative processes and institutions.9 The appointment of the Texan Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as secretary of state already revealed Trump's affinity for petro-fantasies of all sorts. Tillerson, who learned about his dismissal after 14 months as secretary of state via a tweet by the president on March 13, 2018, did not even belong to the hard-core deniers of climate change in Trump's administration. While he did consider it a problem that ought to be solved by a "techno-fix," he did not take it to be a problem that created an ethical obligation or even a political need for action.10 For Trump, Tillerson appeared to be the right man in the right place—at least temporarily. The fact, however, that Tillerson as a businessman made deals in Russia and elsewhere rather than simply drill "ultradeep" within

9 Thus, in Trump's speech, analyzed below, he describes his cooperation with the U.S.- Environmental Protection Agency as if the EPA were not a controlling body but rather an ally in fighting against control and regulation. He also praises Andrew Wheeler, former coal lobbyist and head of the EPA, for the creation and maintenance of small refineries in the country and as someone "[who] loves the environment."

10 Cf. Tillerson, cited in Mooney. See also Tillerson's keynote at the Argus Americas Crude Summit in Houston, Texas, in January 2020, summarized in Baltimore.

the United States was met with the president's disapproval, as were Tillerson's positions on various political questions regarding climate issues (for instance, his backing of a CO2-levy and his support of the Paris Agreement; cf. Egan). As he later revealed, Trump utterly disliked it when he was told that his lofty plans were too simplistic and—on top of that—illegal (Tillerson). This statement appears to substantiate Pease's analysis, according to which Trump used the notion of the frontier site for political purposes, a place quasi-unregulated by law, where extraction is primarily a matter of power, possibly of competition, but certainly not of ethics or even moderation in the sense of sustainable management.

To better illustrate the problems arising from this absence of ecological and economic notions of sustainabilityin the petro-imaginary of the United States, I will analyze Trump's rhetoric of unlimited and affect-saturated "extraction" in the context of his former energy policies that promised short-term success and quick wealth instead of sustainability. A specific focus in this context is on a speech given by Trump at the *Shale Insight Conference* in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 23, 2019, from which the first part of the title of this article is taken.11 In this almost one-hour long address, which was directed at the work force of the local oil industry, the president celebrated his energy-political "successes" and outlined further plans for the energy sector. It can therefore be described as programmatic and can be identified as an example of Trump's characteristic political style referred to as "authoritarian populism."The speech focusses on the "American energy revolution," which he describes as a kind of successful treasure hunt in America, to the supposed benefit of "the people." The repeated reference to subterranean riches evokes adolescent fantasies of unlimited possibilities, and the semantics of revolution is employed to balance against each other the creative and the destructive moments of energy production. The appreciation of the emotional, even sentimental bond to the land in the sense of a rootedness and the exploitation and destruction of the exact same landscape, i.e., the affirmation of the homeland and the simultaneous production of homelessness, are united in a paradoxical kind of conver-

11 The *Shale Insight Conference* is organized by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Ohio Oil & Gas Association, and the West Virginia Oil & Natural Gas Association and has been an annual event since 2011. Among the well-known speakers who have supported the consortium's energy agenda in this context are Rudy Giuliani, Sean Spicer as well as Donald Trump.

gence. This can be read as a product of what Fintan O'Toole described as sadomasochistic structures in authoritarian populisms.

Following the analysis of the speech, the second part of the essay focuses on what has been described as "petrofiction," i.e., texts which are concerned, in the widest sense, with oil—its extraction, sale, and impact on society. The term petrofiction functions as an umbrella term for a whole series of cultural productions, and the wide range of semi-fictional and fictional spins on the topic illustrates the historical and spatial variability of the issue, as well as the multitude of competing interpretations of different scenarios (cf. LeMenager 10ff.; see also Ghosh). Similar to sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco, oil is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, while the focus in petrofictional texts is usually on aspects that address the effects on humans and the environment. More recent texts often critically address the narrative of progress and success employed by Trump in his speeches and put it in a new perspective concerning questions of sustainability. How the land and its resources are to be used, however, remains controversial, and thus the affirmation of the logic of extraction in cultural productions underlies considerable cyclical fluctuations.

In the historical Hollywood drama *Giant* (1956), the agricultural use of the land as a cattle range is still in competition with its use as an oil field and both are normatively saturated: the pasture as rich in tradition, not estranged, idealized in a nostalgic, romanticized manner, but also backward-looking; the oilfield as nouveau riche, estranged, yet forward-looking (cf. LeMenager 5). The film can be regarded as an example of a variant of petrofiction that emerged in the 20th century and has plainly been categorized by Stephanie LeMenager as "pro-oil propaganda" (94). Upton Sinclair's novel *Oil!* (1927; film: *There Will Be Blood*, 2007) is also part of this corpus, as is the television series *Dallas* (1978–1991). The latter fails to critically discuss the wealth and its origin but rather, quite uncritically, indulges in it. It is worth considering the hero of the series and soap opera, businessman and "oil baron" J.R. Ewing, in analogy to former U.S. President Donald Trump. More recent productions portray the oil business in a more ambivalent and critical way: among them, the film *Promised Land* (2012; for an analysis of the film, see the article by Germanaz and Marak in this volume), separate episodes of television series, for example *Longmire* ("The Calling Back," 2015), and numerous literary texts, such as Linda Hogan's *Mean Spirit* (1990; discussed by Gesa Mackenthun in her contribution to this book) and John Sayles' *Yellow Earth* (2020). The latter provides an approach to the cultural imaginary different from campaign speeches and election pledges. Literature can be seen as a kind of interdiscourse (cf. Link),

which takes up symbolizations from the cultural imaginary, adapts, modifies or affirms them in a kind of interplay across established discourse boundaries. In such a vein, a novel is the focal point of the second part of this essay. Jennifer Haigh's *Heat & Light* (2016) is set in rural Pennsylvania, approximately 60 miles from Pittsburgh, and it was published in the same year as Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, not least with the votes of the population of Pennsylvania. The fictional Bakerton is not unlike the town of Barnesboro, where the author herself is from (see my interview with Jennifer Haigh in this volume). Already the novel *Baker Towers*, published in 2005, introduces Haigh's Bakerton-universe and she returns to it in the short stories *News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories* (2013). My focus on *Heat & Light* is not only to acknowledge it as an outstanding literary text, it also pays tribute to the gender-political dimension of the "petro-imaginary" in light of the topic of sustainability and its affective dimensions and side effects.

Thus, in analyzing the link between extraction, frontier spirit, and populism as represented by Donald Trump, the aspect of gender-specific codes within the discourses and the hegemonic notions of femininity and masculinity involved also need to be taken into account. The settler colonialism described in my introduction and its actual as well as metaphorical occupation of the land and the extraction-related damages and devastations to it have been explicitly examined in various seminal works in the field of American studies. In context of the "critical myth-and-symbol school," Annette Kolodny observes a logic of violent penetration and metaphorical violation of the land in the early sources of American colonization by whites, as the title of her classic work *The Lay ofthe Land:Metaphor as Experience and Historyin American Life and Letters* (1975) pointedly suggests. This imagery is not only relevant for gender politics but also from an ecological point of view: Kolodny's "psychohistory" demands a different treatment of both women *and* land, which have been exposed to the "most unbridled and seemingly gratuitous destruction" (27) for a long time. For previous historical periods, Carolyn Merchant has brought together the gender-political and eco-critical dimensions of settlement, referring to the "death of nature," with nature having female connotations and being symbolized accordingly. Merchant's study ends with a reference to the Three-Mile-Island-accident in the Pennsylvanian nuclear power plant in 1979, which had clearly shown the consequences of putting economic interests and profit maximization above the security of the people and the health of the earth: "Three Mile Island is a recent symbol of the earth's sickness caused by radioactive wastes, pesticides, plastics, photochemical smog, and fluorocarbons" (295). This accident also plays an important role in Haigh's novel, as the story is set in different time layers and thus historicizes the connection between the different forms and stages of the extraction of resources, placing them on a temporal continuum linked to one and the same region.

For the representations and fictionalizations supplied by the "petroimaginary," the interdependencies between gender and violence are obvious. According to Heather Turcotte (200), gender and sexuality are central to the symbolizations and representations of petro-violence, i.e., violence which occurs in and is connected to the context of oil exploration and extraction, a connection that has often been neglected in environmental political discourses up until now (cf. Daggett 28). This also results from a continuing sentimentalization and mystification, or rather re-mystification, of the resource oil, which obviously still is more effective than ecological considerations of sustainability and which includes the classical ideas of mystified heroism and rugged masculinity.12 Cara Daggett used the term "petro-masculinity" for this kind of masculinity construction, marked by misogyny, racism, and the denial of climate change. Accordingly, the semantics of penetration and extraction with their male connotations in the context of "drilling" and fracking hardly require an interpretation. However, it can be shown in a next step, that frontiersentimentality manifests itself as masculine "petro-nostalgia" (Dagget 31) or "petromelancholia" (LeMenager 102) in yearnings which bear clearly regressive and retrotopic traits. Daggett describes this as a gateway for authoritarian positions, as long as they cater to the "psycho-affective dimensions" (35) of these yearnings. It is not by coincidence that Daggett also refers to *Women, Floods, Bodies, History*, the first volume of *Male Fantasies*—Klaus Theweleit's seminal work on the theory of fascism—, in order to demonstrate how the control of liquid flows of all kinds can go hand in hand with violence and fantasies of annihilation. Here again, we encounter a sadomasochism which facilitates authoritarian structures, flanked by misogyny and a propensity to violence (ibid. 42–44). This connects to a number of current concerns, especially Trump's energy political fixation on the exploitation of fossil fuels, which, according to Daggett, reveals the latter's "nascent fossil fascism" (ibid. 27).

12 The term "oil-fetishism" was repeatedly used to analyze and characterize this mystification (cf. Huber 296).

#### **"Drill, Baby, Drill": Trump's Energy Policies as Part of His Retrotopic Populism**

The fact that Donald Trump's election victory was not due to a majority of votes of all Americans (the "popular vote") but a majority of electors in the electoral college, determined by the winner-takes-all principle in the individual states, has been sufficiently pointed out elsewhere. Analyses of the election have discussed in detail how Trump—as a surprise to many—could win three states which previously had commanded democratic majorities for decades, even if they were often characterized as swing states: Pennsylvania (one of the founding colonies which stretches far into the west), Michigan, and Wisconsin. These three states, of which Pennsylvania is the most populous and accounts for 20 electoral votes (only California, Texas, New York, and Florida have more), represent in a special way the 18th and 19th century history of settlement, settler colonialism, and the frontier experience, retrospectively glorified in countless texts and classical Hollywood Westerns since James Fenimore Cooper's historical novels. In her partly autobiographical novel *A New Home—Who'll Follow?* (1839), Caroline Kirkland made an early attempt at demystifying the frontier-romanticism and its connotations of masculinity by describing the hardships of this life, the loneliness of women, and the quite unexpected absence of Indians and other spectacular ingredients of the white male narrative of "proving oneself." Ironically, the symbol of the adventure in the West for Kirkland is the hardly sensational but even more so unpleasant "Michigan mudhole,"in which her carriage gets stuck, and which consequently thoroughly demystifies the myth of the West, right at the beginning of her journey (Kirkland 5ff.). Nonetheless, it is exactly this myth of the supposedly formative American experience at the border between "civilization" and "wilderness" that so firmly established the myth of the frontier in the cultural imaginary of the United States; so much so that it can be conjured up, time and time again, in a highly effective way by American presidential candidates, not so long ago by Donald Trump. The politics of affect in Trump's campaign and governing style also relied on a re-enchantment of extraction—Americanstyle and America first—and on a discrediting and erasure of environmental sustainability considerations in the context of global multilateral projects as simply "un-American." This is possibly the most simplistic "argument" that is currently being made in environmental policy debates. The term retrotopia fittingly characterizes the one-sided nostalgic glorification of bygone times, times which are referenced in a palimpsest-like way: the 1980s (Ronald Reagan's presidency), the 1950s ("economic miracle" and postwar conservatism), the turn of the century (Theodore Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders"), or the 1830s (Andrew Jackson's presidency during the "Indian Wars"). The vagueness of the reference makes it all the more resonant and evokes U.S. Cold War discourses of superiority as well as older imperial discourses and frontier romanticism along with their respective "pioneers."

Trump has never been shy about his economic and energy policy views and thus substantiated previously rather latent contradictions (which had also been characteristic of the policies of the Obama administration). As keynote speaker at the *Shale Insight Conference* in Pittsburgh in October 2019, Trump formulated the principles of his energy policies once more and simultaneously celebrated his first "successes."13 His populist rhetoric makes use of clear antagonisms and opposition pairs, providing supposedly obvious solutions to the problems involved. The argumentative pattern is evident in five terms Trump employs, in part in a rather idiosyncratic way: *revolution*, *disaster*, *treasure*,*energy workers*, and *dominance*.

First, Trump establishes a clear dichotomy between his presidency and that of his predecessor, arguing that President Obama and his Democrats had been blocking the American economic development and energy political independence and that they had been standing in the way of the "American energy revolution." The latter, according to Trump's stylization and metaphorization, refers to fracking and similar practices in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In the first part of his speech, he discusses in detail how he has already reversed all previous policies originallyissued to protect the environment and to foster ecological sustainability (many of them introduced under Obama), including the "Waters of the United States Rule," the "Clean Power Act," and, of course, on an international level, the Paris Climate Agreement. The semantics of revolution has a nationalist basis and refers to American independence of foreign resources and foreign tutelage and the return to America's own, longstanding strength, also in reference to energy politics ("We believe the United States should never again be at the mercy of a foreign supplier of energy […] We are committed not only to energy independence but to American energy dominance."). In the speech, Trump also repeats the famous sentence that he "was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris." Revolu-

13 For a video and a transcript of the speech, see Trump 2019a and 2019b respectively. In what follows, all quotes are taken from the speech given in these sources.

tion in this case does not go hand in hand with social redistribution but with the consolidation of hierarchy and inequality.

In many of his speeches, Trump employs terminology that is also prominently used in debates about sustainability. However, he criticizes the prioritization of ecological matters as a principally wrong-guided attack on U.S.interests, repeatedly refers to the policies of his predecessor as well as the current continuation of these policies by Democratic politicians as a "disaster," and even talks of "total destruction." Yet in his case, the metaphors of catastrophe and destruction do not refer to environmental damage, climate change, and air pollution but to economic issues—without reference to any notion of sustainability. The environment does not appear to be worthy or even in need of protection—unlike the economy. Jobs need to be created, secured, and protected from "total destruction."The sustainability debate is thus reduced to absurdity. Trump's political campaign promises to save sectors and regions that had been especially hard hit by deindustrialization by means of a short-term "re-industrialization"—for example by reviving "King Coal" (as in the "Trump digs coal" slogan) and by extending fracking—turned out to be anachronistic and are tantamount to a rejection of environmentally friendly technologies that promote sustainability. It seems only apt to acknowledge Naomi Klein's thesis of "disaster capitalism" as a perfidious strategy of profit optimization under the cover of crisis management, which she illustrates with various examples (e.g., the profits of the oil industry following hurricane Katrina [cf. Klein 2007, 2017]). The crises of the "rust belt" and of the cities and states belonging to it, among them Pittsburgh, develop at a slower pace and take place in longer temporal cycles. Nonetheless, they are cases of "disasters," the intended management of which, as announced by Trump, clearly allows analogies to Klein's examples. Besides the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, there are further individuals who receive a scolding from Trump—all those who do not unconditionally agree with his political course, among them Democratic members of Congress, and former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. The latter for the time being provided a fitting foil for comparison with Trump in several aspects: as a Democrat and thus political opponent (Cuomo had also been touted as a potential presidential candidate), as a pipeline opponent (Cuomo, who in the meantime has stepped down due to sexual harassment allegations, was against a gas pipeline across his state and against fracking), as part of the establishment (already his father had been governor of New York), and as part of the East Coast elite (Cuomo is originally from New York City—as is Trump himself, however).

In his speech, Trump distances himself sharply from any kind of hesitation and procrastination and presents himself as the doer *par excellence*. Any skepticism towards extraction, any deliberating policies of sustainability are equated with passiveness and inaction and consequently demonized. The people in Democratic New York were "sitting on a goldmine of energy," while the Democrats were keeping those treasures, the mineral resources, well away from them. The Trumpian treasure hunt in all of its manifestations (drilling, offshore drilling, fracking, mountaintop removal) and by all possible means is praised as a remedy in order to keep in check both supposedly anti-business bureaucrats, who insist on authorization procedures and slow down the "energy revolution," as well as civic protests of various groups. The latter are hardly addressed directly, and when some protesters loudly make themselves heard in the room, they are implicitly threatened by Trump, who taunts them by telling them to go home to their "mama" immediately. This is a well-known strategy: It is the feminization of environmental activists as "tree huggers," which insinuates a loss of "true" masculinity.14 The closeness to nature and the concern for it (traditionally linked to femininity and passiveness) contrasts with its subjugation, domination, and exploitation and their respective connotations of masculinity and activity. This is also part of a complex that Daggett refers to and analyzes as "petro-masculinity."15 And this is also where the cultural and ideological difficulty of a turn towards sustainability—roundly rejected and even ridiculed by Trump and his followers—becomes apparent. It would presuppose a rethinking on many levels in order to question hegemonial cultural settings, to accept alternative epistemologies, to recode notions of ecological, economic, and social sustainability as desirable and attractive, and to establish such attitudes in the cultural imaginary.

14 Not only is "treehugger" a relevant term from the perspective of gender politics, but at the same time it insinuates a wrong-guided sentimentality, ridiculous esotericism, and a work-shy detachment from reality (especially in contrast to the physically hardworking people in the energy industry, including fracking) and thus discredits environmental concerns.

15 An alternative model of accepted masculinity is described by Martin Hultman in reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger as "ecomodern masculinity." Schwarzenegger had outgrown the clichés of the male hero as bodybuilder, cowboy, or also Terminator and instead managed to project a new mixture of "toughness and compassion" onto himself with his political career (Hultman 87). It is not by coincidence that Schwarzenegger was often targeted by Trump's snide criticism.

The slogan "Drill, Baby, Drill" which served as a subtitle to this paragraph predates Trump's presidency even though it pointedly characterizes his positions in several respects. The slogan was already introduced in 2008 by the Republican Michael Steele and was intoned with its obviously suggestive undertones at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, during which John McCain was chosen as the presidential candidate with Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee. It was already in this context that the link between fracking practices and explicit "country first"-rhetoric emerged, from which it is only a small step to "America first" (cf. Steele). Palin took up the slogan and usedit as the headline of a 2009 article directed at Barack Obama. Init, she aggressively pledged in favor of offshore drilling in Alaska and elsewhere, quite similarly to Trump.

Obama consistently opposed encroachment on the Arctic NationalWildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other protected regions of the United States. Consequently, Trump blames the Obama administration for not digging up "America's vast energies and treasures." The inability or unwillingness to unearth America's vast treasures is a recurring accusation throughout his speech. It is indeed quite remarkable that Trump likes to use the term "treasure" (see also 2017a, 2019c), evoking the invitation to a treasure hunt on a grand scale, with its associations of Gold Rush (along with its accompanying atmosphere) as well as the memories of typical classics in film and youth literature, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's *Treasure Island*. Following literary scholar Leslie Fiedler, the regressive aspect of "petro-masculinity" could be identified here in the form of a greedy narcissism with a one-sided view of the world as a place to satisfy one's own libidinal wishes, crying "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!" like Stevenson's Captain Flint.

While Trump refers to his political adversaries as "anti-energy zealots," who are "blinded by ideology"—the ideology of sustainability one could add—, he flatters the workers in attendance by attributing positive characteristics to them, calling them "our great energy people." However, he reserves the title "warriors" (which are apparently needed in a revolution) for his Pennsylvanian party comrades and congressional representatives. Trump portrays the former as having been unjustly deprived of the treasure they deserve up until now, thus catering to the resentments of those "left behind" in contrast to the elites and interpellating them as the big winners of his energy policy turnaround. Whilst Trump directly addresses the "great energy people," workers—men and women—appear on stage on either side of the speaker like well-draped extras. Clad in safety vests and helmets as "blue-collar workers," they simultaneously

represent fervent adherents of his policies.Three of them are allowed to briefly step in front of the microphone in order to add an appearance of authenticity to the whole choreography. In the course of his performance, Trump seems to already extract the energy from his "energy workers," who greet him with thunderous applause. Their display on stage is meant to validate his policies as politics for the "common people." A wide angle shot of the room reveals that, apart from the workers onstage, it is mainly filled with oil industry officials and lobbyists. This is hardly surprising, given that the conference fees start at \$625 and the Shale Insight website describes its participants as the "leaders" and "decision makers" of the branch. Thus, the dramaturgy of the event presents Trump on stage flanked by his blue-collar supporters, while the audience mostly consists of participants in suits and ties who attend the spectacle. The phrase "energy people" obscures the difference between the two status groups, while the term "energy" is repeatedly being linked to "potential"—which in a quite neo-liberal style re-delegates the responsibility for the success of energy production to every single person in the room. If they fail to realize the energy potential, it is not the failure of Trump's politics. Regulatory intermediaries—be they labor unions or government agencies—find no (positive) mention. Any sets of rules and regulations appear a source of annoyance and a hindrance to the exponential "unlocking" of profit potentials, i.e., the energy revolution.

The re-nationalization of Trump's policies directs attention back to certain parts of the country which had been hit hard by deindustrialization (and which Trump idealizes in a rather one-sided way), and it combines notions of national greatness with those of nostalgic memories of the days of coal mining and other extractive practices. Trump's agenda owes its attractiveness for voters, who see themselves as the losers of globalization and its economic consequences, to this type of retrotopic references.16 The speech ends with Trump reaffirming his energy policies and the superiority and "dominance" of the United States, which according to him is now once more "the greatest energy superpower in the history of the world." Other countries would try to emulate the United States but still never catch up, due to the superiority of the American "energy workers," who—as has already been stated—are objectified multiple times during and after the speech. In the end, diverse topics and slogans superimpose each other, when Trump "supplements" his

16 Cf. in this respect the seminal and much discussed empirical studies by Cramer, Hochschild, and Duina.

explanations concerning energy with several other campaign topics: the right to own weapons, the necessity of building a wall at the border to Mexico, and getting rid of "sanctuary cities" in order to "keep America great."

Thus, Trump's speech at the *Shale Insight Conference* turns into an election campaign event—like so many other of his appearances, regardless of place and occasion. On a podium offered by the fossil fuel industry, speaking to the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. president talks in the fashion of a businessman, not a statesman, and he uses the stage mainly to stylize himself as a doer—a "builder" and a boss. To summarize, Trump's speech puts economics and ecology in an antagonistic front-line position, which he correlates with further binary oppositions: masculinity/masculinization vs. femininity/feminization; active domination of nature vs. passive conservation; American independence vs. American dependence and dictation by other nations; prosperity and wellbeing vs. poverty and unemployment; economic profit maximization vs. ecological sustainability. The front-line between economy and ecology characteristic of authoritarian populisms eliminates forms of mediation and compromise as well as social issues that represent an important dimension of sustainability debates. The social inequality between blue-collar workers with their Trump-pleasing pathos formulas on stage and the industry officials in the auditorium is successfully obscured—as is the fact that the extraction is mostly only short-lived anyways and the jobs in extension of the idea of "extractive colonialism" are not sustainable.This is accomplished by inserting the position of the treasure-seeking president into the crumbling foundation of American exceptionalism, built on 19th century extraction-based settler colonialism and promising a new "golden era of American energy" (Trump 2017b).

#### **"More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath": Jennifer Haigh's Literary Archeology of a Region in** *Heat & Light*

The concept of region is significant for the petro-imaginary in times of globalization. Sustainability debates also emphasize the role of glocality, i.e., the global-local nexus. A reflection on the return of regionalism against the changed backdrop of globalization cuts across disciplines; it can also be found in literary and cultural studies (cf., for example, Mahoney/Katz; Lösch et al.). Jennifer Haigh's novel *Heat & Light*, which was published in 2016—the year Trump was elected president, also by a majority of the residents of Pennsylvania, who associated his promise to reindustrialize the region with hopes for a better life—is set not far from the site of Trump's previously analyzed speech. The novel contextualizes and historicizes the statements of the then incoming president in multiple ways, since it incorporates in its plot different groups of actors and their different perspectives in multiple narrative strands (cf. Michaud), thus unraveling the complexity of extraction practices. Literary critics attest Haigh a great success with her novel. As a chronicler of Western Pennsylvania, the author focusses on a little town close to the metropolis of Pittsburgh. The town Bakerton is a microcosm in which important steps in the region's history but also in that of the nation are condensed: the dispossession of the land of the Seneca; the immigration from southern and eastern Europe in the 19th century; the progressing industrialization; coal mining, which thanks to the jobs in the mines led to the town's modest prosperity while severely damaging the workers' health and from time to time even killing them. Originally, the town was named after the mines, whose name again derives from the Baker brothers, the founders of this "company town" in the 1880s, "who dug the first coal mine in the valley and named an entire town after themselves" (Haigh 2016: 3). Not far from the fictional Bakerton, Titusville, Pennsylvania, is also the site of the first oil boom in American history, when in 1859 Edwin L. Drake discovered oil for the so-called Seneca Oil Company. However, the region was also the site of the biggest reactor accident in the history of the United States, where dangerous amounts of radioactive substances leaked from the Three-Mile-Island-reactor in 1979, about which the population was only inadequately informed and in a piecemeal fashion.

These events are already history when the novel sets in. The earlier history with its focus on immigrant families at the times of coal mining is told in Haigh's previous novel *Baker Towers* and her short stories in *News from Heaven.* In *Heat & Light,* the coalmines have already been closed for a very long time. A tragic mining accident in which a lot of men died has become part of the town's collective memory. Now it is almost a ghost town, partly reduced to ruins, partly run down and neglected—a place in decline, hoping for a different economic future. The construction of a new prison complex has created new jobsin the structurally weak region,agricultureis still practicedin some places, and there is a pub in the town's old noble hotel called "The Commercial" and various public facilities. It has become a town of women and widows ("Only the widows remain," 11). The remaining inhabitants are willing to believe in a new economic miracle, when they receive offers to sell the subterranean lease rights for their land in order to extract natural gas via fracking from the "Marcellus Shale" that expands a mile below the surface of the earth. "*Beautiful property*

*you've got here*" (9–10, italics in original)—this is the first sentence with which Bobby Frame, the sales agent of the energy company from Texas, addresses the land owners in Bakerton, and most of them are easy targets for him. As part of his sales strategy, he uses the language and the typical euphemisms of the energy corporations that also Trump used in his speech: "*Buried treasure*, says Bobby, feeling the poetry" (10). Yet not all of them sell their lease rights, and this leads to tensions among the inhabitants who up until then had been living side by side quite indifferently. Slowly, protest materializes against the practice of fracking, especially after the workers brought in from Texas have already started to work and Bobby Frame's promises and claims do not prove true—neither concerning the financial compensation nor the quality of life of the inhabitants during the fracking process.The statement "We drill a half mile down […] We're so far down you'll never know we're there" (10) turns out to be plain wrong.

The plot starts in 2010 and ends in 2012, while the story line is interspersed with flashbacks: The one reaching back furthest is to the year 1979, from which the story returns to the present in several time jumps (1988, 1992, 2004, 2005). The text creates a multi-faceted panorama of the people involved, who hold different views on the promised comeback of the town and on fracking as part of the projected "energy revolution." The ensemble of Bakerton's inhabitants consists of Rich and Shelby Devlin and their two children, Braden and Olivia; Rena and "Mack" (Susan Mackey), who practice organic dairy farming on their ranch; and Rena's son Calvin who is serving time in the prison where Rich works as a guard. Rena meets Lorne Trexler, geologist and activist, who organizes protests against fracking, and she starts to support his work. Then there is the Rev. Jess, whose husband Wes, her predecessor as the parish pastor, had died of cancer early on and who had attributed his illness to his childhood in close proximity to the damaged Three Mile Island reactor. Wes' story following the disaster is reviewed retrospectively in a separate section of the book. Jess, who is now single, is drawn to one of the oil workers, Herc, with whom she builds a relationship, while Herc hides his family in Texas from her. Other workers of the drill rig—Brando, Jorge, Mickey—also come into view: Each and everyone of them is uprooted, alone and has left his family temporarily for the strenuous work ("There are no soft jobs on a drill rig," 98), content they have one in the first place; their social relationships are mainly confined to the camp and the pub. Aggression and struggles for recognition and about distribution between workers from Texas and locals are on the rise, while those actually responsible are hiding behind a chain of subcontractors, telephone waiting lines, and "slippery PR flacks" (205) and remain elusive. The state and its agencies appear to be absent—Bakerton has a single "town cop" (Chief Carnicella is chief of police without any employees, 78). The regulatory authorities Trump rails against in his speech do not exist in Bakerton, and the people, lured by the prospects of profit, entirely in line with the vague and ultimately unfulfilled rhetoric of "potential," are defenseless against the profit interests of the companies and the distortions caused by the unscrupulous exploitation practices. The police does not even protect the most vulnerable, Bakerton's women and children, from domestic abuse.

Most workers who come to Bakerton are originally from Texas, and Texas is also the site of the headquarter of the company which operates the fracking in Bakerton and which considers the new site a pathbreaking investment, a steppingstone for their expansion in the North East. The CEO of the company, Clifford 'Kip' Oliphant, posing for a cover story with his horse in front of his ranch, is hailed as a "new cowboy" at the "new frontier" of fracking (26). Here, the novel demonstrates the continuity of the cultural imaginary between the old settler colonialism and the new forms of resource extraction as well as between the "old" oil drilling in Texas and the application of the new fracking technology in the North East of the country—and this in an almost legal vacuum. Haigh's meticulously detailed description of a shareholder meeting of Dark Elephant Energy clearly points to, in some ways even anticipates, the kind of setting of Trump's speeches in front of officials and lobbyists, as discussed above in an exemplary way. The manner in which the novel details the CEO's preparations in his hotel room, self-indulgently practicing his poses, honing his rhetoric, choosing his clothes, and doing anything to make a good impression and to convince the audience, appears almost like a parody, and the depicted behavior shows clear traits of an authoritarian populist style of leadership. In the short term, he will succeed, but in the long run—and this is part of poetic justice—he will suffer personal and professional damage. At the same time, the novel is equally critical in its portrayal of the protest culture against fracking: The charismatic professor of geology and environmentalist Lorne Trexler makes increasingly condescending remarks about the population of Pennsylvania, also affronting Rena, when she accompanies him to a protest event in New York, where she experiences a feeling of estrangement with university protest culture. Also, Mack feels out of place when she parks her pick-up on the college campus. Lorne's former student, now advisor for an energy company, makes fun of Lorne's arrogance: "Lorne Trexler, the famous populist, champion of the working classes until they dare to disagree with him"

(375). Hence, also Lorne instrumentalizes the residents of Bakerton for his own ends and dumps them when they are no longer useful to him. With this depiction, the text of course runs a certain risk of reproducing the well-known topos of the seducibility of "honest people" by outsiders, not only found in the Western and in numerous representations of the heartland but also in populist rhetoric.

Several other characters inhabit the fictional world of this novel, yet it is the town itself that constitutes the center of the story, a marginal place for the United States that, for centuries, has experienced nothing but extraction and has periodically been "disemboweled" and then forgotten once more: "Rural Pennsylvania doesn't fascinate the world, not generally. But cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Bore it, strip it, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need. Bakerton understands this in its bones" (11). The imagery of the "entrails," suggesting a kind of slaughter as it is performed in the context of meat production, is drastic, and it goes hand in hand with other practices of violation, ultimately even annihilation—not primarily of jobs but of a habitat that is fit for human beings. Looting nature and sacrificing Bakerton is the downside of the adolescent story of a treasure hunt and the promise of happiness that can be heard in both Dark Elephant Energy's marketing and Trump's speech. The place itself, from which the treasure is extracted by any means available, is virtually a collateral damage in the procedure. In a similar context, Traci Voyles has coined the term "wastelanding," which she uses to describe the process of exposing an ecosystem and its human inhabitants to irreversible environmental pollution—in a calculated manner and without providing any protection. In this, it follows the logic and economy of extraction without a single thought on sustainability and ecological consequences. Many of the characters in Bakerton have internalized this logic, no questions asked, as "knowledge in the bones" (Shotwell 125). The connection between the logic of extraction and the metaphor of violent penetration has repeatedly been polemically explicated in analogies of "fracking" and "fucking": Protest posters say "MOTHERFRACKERS, GO HOME" (370), Bakerton is suffering a "FRACK-ING NIGHTMARE" (179), and Darren (Rich's brother) wonders: "*Fracking*. The word sounds subliminally obscene,a genteel euphemism for*fucking*"(179).This, once more, brings to mind Annette Kolodny's *Lay of the Land.*

On the occasion of a birthday party for Rich's father, who had been a mine worker himself, the family eventually grasps the actual extent of the encroachment caused by oil extraction on their own land they themselves now no longer have control of:

They cross the yard together, Dick, Rich, and Braden leading the way, followed by Darren, Shelby, and Olivia. They climb the rise and look down. Five acres of pasture have been razed and flattened, spread with gravel and marked off with chain-link fence […] The scale of the operation is shocking, but not surprising. Rich knew what he was in for. (193)

Together, three generations speechlessly stare at the huge sealed and fenced area. Later on, when they are having their barbeque, it becomes noisy and uncomfortable. The situation seems like a reprise of the titular metaphor in Leo Marx's study on the industrialization of the former agrarian nation, *The Machine in the Garden*:

An immense truck, larger than any he's ever seen, is climbing the access road, or trying to. The thing moves at the speed of a cruise ship, enveloped in a cloud of diesel fumes […] In stunned silence they watch the hulking machine inch up the ridge. That it moves at all is a straight-up miracle. It's as though an aircraft carrier has run aground in Rich's back yard." (195–96)

Here, Haigh impressively creates a form of what Miles Orvell (2006) has referred to as "destructive sublime": a moment of being overwhelmed, almost a perverted experience of grace in the face of the presence of technology and its destructive potential.17

The emphasis on the disproportionality of the military-grade high tech of fracking and the modest size of the farm highlights the disproportionality of the means of energy extraction themselves and also the asymmetry of power between the large Texan corporation and the individual landowner whose dreams of future farming are being shattered by fracking. Rich's aspirations for an economically viable future on his land and for his family have thus failed. In a way, Rich embodies the link between the generations and the professions in the novel—he was in the army (in a war also waged for oil), works in prison, jobs in his father's bar, goes fishing with his son, and dreams of a future life as a farmer. Like many in Bakerton, he considers his failure in the face of the reality of extraction as the result of his own wrongdoing: his greed to get the money for the lease, his inability to read the small print of the contract, and his unrealistic hopes to be able to farm the land on his own again. At the end of

17 Cf. Orvell's conceptualization of the term as an ambivalent combination of "aesthetic excitement" and "ethical response" (2006) and his analysis of the large-format photographs of the Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, especially in the publication *Oil*, as an example for the "apocalyptic ruin" discourse (2016, 32–36).

the novel, he reminisces his childhood and how he was interested in the early history of the region before settler colonialism:

How the world must have looked then, in Indian times: his own corner of the world before roads and bridges, tipples and steel mills, the sprawling strip mines that blackened the earth like char. As a boy he imagined it, vividly. As a man he learned it didn't matter. (427)

This reflection contrasts the visions of re-industrialization and the "technological sublime" of fracking with another kind of imagination, a sketch of a premodern existence, connoted with childlike curiosity andinnocence and colored with nostalgia. It seems to me symptomatic that Rich quietly takes refuge in a retrotopia instead of envisioning an ecological utopia, when his private conceptions of the future lie shattered by economic realities. According to Fredric Jameson, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (xii)—and one could modify this: the end of extraction-based oil capitalism. However, sustainability depends to a considerable degree on whether and how convincingly it can be imagined: "The imagination structures existent practices of sustainability which are carried outin a variety of social fields(politics, economy, civil society, science) and which in turn structure the imagination" (Adloff 292). In a positive light, the above quotation from the novel can also be understood as an indication that unlearning the (neo)colonial views and certainties internalized through socialization represents the first step towards a liberation of the imagination from the well-worn tracks of the logic of exploitation.

What is below the ground, the supposed treasure, remains hidden from the readers of Haigh's novel.The lives of the novel's characters in Bakerton take place above ground. Here they observe the changes to their drinking water and in their animals' behavior, and they sense how the earth is shaking.*Heat & Light* spells out the grave and lasting side-effects of the course Trump advertises in his speech at the *Shale Insight Conference*—and which he has continued to espouse ever since. Haigh's novel is the poetic "package insert" to his promised cure-all, possibly even unmasking him as a fraudulent "miracle healer" who captivates his audience with fantastic prospects (which soon turn out to be false predictions) in order to make them forget their own vulnerability along with the injuries inflicted on them. In Haigh's novel, however, there are no easy causalities and one-sided blame. Rena's realization that it is probably Shelby herself who is harming her daughter to compensate for an attention deficit and that she is not sickened by the quality of the water after fracking (even if it smells bad) does not stop Lorne from exploiting the child's illness for his

own purposes.When the fracking company changes its business model and replaces its CEO because the market collapses due to oversupply, the workers are let go and the "drill sites go silent" (405) virtually overnight. Fracking in Bakerton ends, at least momentarily, since it is no longer profitable—and for no other reason than that. And above it all, a sentence is floating midair, keeping alive the nostalgic desire for meaning and dominance at the entrance to the town, in pale letters that are hardly legible any more: "BAKERTON COAL LIGHTS THE WORLD" (180, 425).18

#### **Conclusion**

The goal of this essay was to examine in an exemplary way Donald Trump's speech at the *Shale Insight Conference* 2019 (an example of a whole series of programmatically similar energy political speeches during his presidency and after) and Jennifer Haigh's novel *Heat & Light* from 2016 in order to identify and analyze the logic of extraction, "American-style," in different discourses in their respective culture-specific varieties and ideological orientations. The programmatic rejection of considerations of sustainability has already been described as a cornerstone of exploitation in context of the 19th century critique of capitalism—"Après moi le déluge! is the election cry of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation" (Marx). Donald Trump's speech delivered 150 years later on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean seems to confirm this diagnosis. However, a closer look reveals that the logic of extraction in Trump's rhetoric is amalgamated with certain mythologems of U.S. history and elements of American exceptionalism, and it is precisely this combination that guarantees the kind of resonance in parts of the population that enabled Trump's path to the White House and secured him astonishing approval ratings. While the former president propagated an increased exploitation of resources as a simple solution to the economic problems of deindustrialization, Haigh's fictional text indicates that the extraction of fossil fuels is responsible for the

18 While many of the life plans in Bakerton fail, Mack and Rena's farm possibly remains the only positive and viable model for sustainable management. Yet also their business success suffers damage due to the town's association with the practices of fracking, since the urbanite costumers in Pittsburgh no longer trust the quality of their products. Sustainability needs to be commodifiable, too. The novel leaves open to what extent their business will recover from this.

crisis of the economic system, that, in fact, the extraction capitalism produces these crises.

The literary contextualization of fracking within historical forms of a depletion of nature sheds light on the long history of unscrupulous exploitation and extraction, which have created social and economic inequality and caused the destruction of nature and continues to do so, ignoring any considerations about sustainability. This historization modifies the simplifying antagonisms and dichotomies proclaimed by Trump and the fracking lobby. Against the backdrop of U.S. self-stylizations, the sustainability discourse is taunted to be fundamentally un-American in that it has little alignment with the hegemonic notions of masculinity, success, and a treatment of nature that prioritizes technological progress over care. This is clearly suggested by Trump's speech in a not-so-subtle way and with an air of authoritarianism. At closer sight, however, Trump's populist practices of performance reveal the division between the workers (who are instrumentalized as extras with only a minor role to play) and the industry officials and lobbyists (who control the means of production). In contrast to this, I consider Haigh's novel—despite all the stark differences between political and literary discourse—as a contribution that adds to the complexity of the energy policy debate and examines the mixed emotions and affective dissonances (Ladino's term) attached to the topic. That both discourses refer to the cultural imaginary constitutes a unifying element. *Heat & Light* challenges the dichotomies that Trump's speech creates, and it shows that contrary to the propagated *frontier*-drunk faith in progress in a neoliberal fashion, there cannot only be "winners" and "potentials" and that the underground treasure hunt demands a high price from many people. Moreover, the novel shifts the focus from primarily economic factors to ecological and social ones. Interpersonal relations—at times violent and exploitative (also in the sense of "petro-masculinity")—recur as the main theme and they reveal profound differences between people and their different socializations and milieus. Many more aspects could be addressed, for example the continuing relevance of the oil crisis, dating back to Jimmy Carter's presidency (an epigraph in Haigh's novel comes from him), or the ongoing resistance of indigenous groups to Trump's energy policies (which includes the construction of controversial pipelines on Indigenous territory), simultaneously pointing to the tragic history of land dispossession and destruction of alternative epistemologies.

The difficulty of anchoring notions of economic and environmental sustainability in the U.S. cultural imaginary in the first place has been diagnosed repeatedly; at times it seems easier to captivate the public's imagination with asteroid mining and the colonization of space as new frontiers of energy production (cf. Abrahamian) than to encourage ecological rethinking towards the use of renewable energies and the protection of the environment. The petroregime suggests and nurtures notions of a dependence on oil and other fossil fuels, which it portrays as being without alternative. This way, it can fuel even the most far-fetched notions of a successful search for these raw materials and mineral resources time and time again with reference to the frontier spirit.

In an era of globalization, such a petro-regime is of course not only an American phenomenon, as is demonstrated by critical petrofictions of other countries. If we broaden our perspective, we can find literary treatments of the topic also in so-called oil states. As examples, one could refer to Abdalrachman Munif 's novel *Cities of Salt* (1988 [1984]) from Lebanon, the novel of the Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi *Love in the Kingdom of Oil* (2001 [1993]), the short story "Oil Field" (2011) by Saudi-Arabian author Mohammed Hasan Alwan, and *How Beautiful We Were* (2021) by the Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue. Some texts by Nigerian author and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1995 [1986]) also address the role of oil as a resource in the context of corruption and state failure in Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa paid for his system-critical revelations with his life, especially for his disclosures of neocolonial extraction practices and environmental pollution by Shell in his home region of Ogoniland for which he created international publicity. Two further texts within a Nigerian context are Ben Okri's short story "What the Tapster Saw" (1988) and Helon Habila's novel *Oil on Water* (2010).

An important aspect for analyzing sustainability discourses is the identification of culture-specific patterns that either challenge or promote it. Literature, as well as popular culture, can play a role in making sustainability narratable and imaginable and thus to develop and circulate notions of sustainability. Literature invites reflection on a problem without explicitly calling for action and perhaps has a special role to play here in context of work within/on the cultural imaginary. I have touched on how fundamental a shift in thinking must be in order to prioritize sustainability over other interests, in this case in the United States, in terms of gender discourses, regional differences, structures of feeling, and a long history of habitualized extraction and exploitation of natural resources. To provide a broader perspective, there are elements in the national manifestation of anti-sustainability sensitivities that can be connected to transnational and transcultural discourses. Therefore, it seems possible—and necessary—to anchor the topic of sustainability in a transnational (cultural) imaginary in the long term.

#### **References**

st.com/entertainment/books/heat-and-light-is-the-best-fracking-novelever/2016/05/10/ef5199b6–16bb-11e6–924d-838753295f9a\_story.html.

Saro-Wiwa, Ken. (1986) 1995. *A Forest of Flowers*. Harlow: Longman.

Sayles, John. 2020. *Yellow Earth*. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

### **"Lots of Troubling Ideologies": A Conversation with Writer Jennifer Haigh about Region, Extractivism, and Nostalgia**

*Heike Paul and Jennifer Haigh*

Jennifer Haigh is a prominent and highly esteemed voice in contemporary U.S. American literature and the author of six novels and numerous short stories to date. She received an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002.

The interview with the author took place on March 9, 2022. It has subsequently been edited for clarity and concision.

**Heike Paul (HP hereafter):** When I first read your amazing novel *Heat & Light* (2016), I did not know whether Bakerton, the town that is the setting of the novel, actually existed, so I went to look it up. Sometimes you find that writers make up their own geography entirely and yet, such fictional geographies can be very similar to real places. To me,it was intriguing that both seems to be true in the case of the town of Bakerton. It is a place that you seem to be intimately familiar with and very much connected to. Still, it is not a place we can find on a map. In what ways do you consider Bakerton, Pennsylvania, your invention? In what way do you consider yourself producing a chronicle of a certain kind of region or place in the United States?

**Jennifer Haigh (JH hereafter):** The short answer is that indeed both things are true. Bakerton has its roots in a place that actually exists. It is the town where I grew up, a coal-mining town, in Western Pennsylvania. In many ways, my hometown resembles Bakerton but in other ways, it does not. I invented the name Bakerton. Like the town where I grew up, which was called Barnesboro, Bakerton is named after a coalmine.The mine was there first. Later, there was a critical mass of miners and so it became a town. My town Barnesboro came about in exactly the same way, and I find it significant that the mine was there first. They were towns founded for a particular reason, and that reason no longer exists, they have outlived their reason for existing, and that, to me, is very interesting. A lot of my writing about Bakerton deals with that idea. My short stories in the collection *News from Heaven* focus on how people find a way to continue in this town when its purpose is gone. That clearly reflects my experience growing up where I did. When I was a child, the coalmines were still functioning, and these towns were bustling. They were vibrant little towns. I was probably 11 or 12, when the mine started to fail and by the time I finished high school,it was all over, completely finished.These towns, as they exist now, are kind of ghost towns. My mother still lives there—she is 91 years old and not going anywhere, and I go back there to visit her—but everyone my age and younger has mostly left. It is a hard place to make a living now, as the mines were the only industry. Now that they are gone, there isn't very much to do. Cousins of mine who have stayed in this region are either working as prison guards, like Rich Devlin (a character in *Heat & Light*), or they are working in nursing homes with the elderly. Because the population there is aging, many old people need care. It is very much a transformed place from the town where I grew up, and that transformation has been a subject of my work.My first book is set in Bakerton at a time when the mines were booming. I have no memory of that time as the novel opens in 1944, when I had not been born yet. I grew up hearing these stories about what this place was like when things were good, and I have always had the urge to travel back in time and see what that was like. That was the impulse that led to my writing *Baker Towers*: wanting to time-travel and experience the town when it was supposedly a good place to live. When I was growing up, it was already a very hard place to live, and it has only gotten harder. But when my parents were growing up, it was very much the Bakerton you see in *Baker Towers*: That was their experience, coming of age in this region in northern Appalachia. Many Americans do not even realize that Western Pennsylvania is part of Appalachia.When I travel to Kentucky, or West Virginia, I feel much more at home than I do in Philadelphia. While Philadelphia is the other end of Pennsylvania, it is culturally entirely different. It is much wealthier; it was never predicated on extraction the way Western Pennsylvania is. That has been completely formative, the culture of this place is absolutely influenced by being founded on an extractive economy.

 While it was an individual experience, it was, as you describe it, a kind of collective experience as well, of things shutting down, this being the end of something, without there being a real plan of what is going to happen next.

**JH:** Yes, and I was aware of this as a child. My father was a schoolteacher, so he was not in danger of losing his job. But all my friends' fathers were coal miners, and their families were really struggling. Lots of families moved away, because there was no more work. I lost friends at that age, which was my experience of this as a child. This is a true story: When I was 11 or 12, I went back to school in September with a new pair of sneakers. I got them every year and so did everyone else.That year, I was the only kid in my class who had new sneakers. I was so ashamed of having new sneakers, I wouldn't wear them. It was very clear to me that nobody else could have them, but I could because my father wasn't a miner. That was my understanding of what was happening. Nobody understood that this was a permanent change. It turned out to be permanent, but at the time, this wasn't clear. The economy of coal mining or oil drilling or gas drilling had always been cyclical. There were ups and downs, there were slowdowns.Even when the town was booming, themines would sometimes experience a slowdown and the men would maybe only work three days a week. That would last for a period, and then business would improve, and they would be back to working five days a week.The slowdown was a familiar phenomenon and, I think, that's how people understood it at first. It wasn't clear for some time that they were not coming back.

**HP**: In your Bakerton-novels and short stories, you describe an interesting mix of emotions amidst changing times. In *Heat & Light*, specifically, you seem to indicate that you see some sort of historical continuum for which extractivism is foundational and that you do extend backwards to settler colonialism and forward to fracking. It seems to be a very ambivalent issue to build a community around logics of extraction, and I was struck by this sentence in the novel: "More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath." It seems both so powerful, and at the same time mystical. In the way that you critique extractivism, you also seem to talk about some sort of mystery of what is hidden, what we cannot get at. That even if we think we can understand a place, we do not seem to grasp all there is to it.

**JH:** Yes, and in this way, Western Pennsylvania is similar to Kentucky or Tennessee or all these Appalachian states who have all been determined by extractive economies. This is not universally true in the U.S., but it certainly is a regional truth. In many ways, these places are blessed and cursed by the same thing: It comes down to geology. And the same geology that produced coal, also produced oil and gas. They're all there for the same reasons, it's just that the

technology has changed. We've known for a long time that there is an ocean of natural gas in this region. But for a long time, we didn't have the technology to extract it. Geologists had known it was down there, there was simply no way to get at it. That changed in the 1990s and that is why gas exploration has begun there. In a certain way, it appears to be the destiny of that region to be extracted.

**HP:**In an essay included in this volume I compare your novel and put it in contrast to one of the speeches the former president Trump gave in front of oil lobbyists, because he was always so fond of talking about what I like to call the "treasure hunt narrative" with phrases such as "all that wealth underneath," "why don't you dig it up," "we just have to take it outside, and then we are rich," and "why don't you want to do that." This kind of performance reminds me of a character in your book who is contoured along the same lines. I contrast this speech with the novelistic discourse that you unfold in your book, because I think it provides an interesting antidote to this discourse of finding a treasure, just having to dig, and then everyone being rich.

**JH:**It's true! Of course, it makes sense to me that the people in that region have been huge supporters of Donald Trump, because it is a narrative that appeals to them, to their sense of nostalgia. I think it is very pertinent to talk about the culture of extraction in the context of sentimentality. There is a kind of mythology that people in this region cling to, this idea that things were much better in the past when you could mine and drill without regulation, without restriction. If you look at the campaigns of Donald Trump: He ran on nostalgia. Think about his campaign promise "Make America Great Again." The implication is that it used to be great, and now it no longer is. That he is going to turn back the clock to the times when things were great. The people in that region who have suffered terribly, economically, have responded very enthusiastically to that appeal.There is a real sentimental attachment to the idea of mining and miners. The miners are almost heroic figures in these communities, because everybody's father or grandfather was a coal miner, and it is inextricably tied to this kind of reverence for family and ancestry. My grandfathers were both coal miners. Six of my uncles were coal miners. Every person there has a connection to this history of mining and people see very keenly the contrast between how things used to be and how desperately hard things are now and have been for a long time now. It has now been 30 years of hard times and more. This nostalgic appeal was very effective there. Even though, of course, Donald Trump knows nothing about coal mining or working class people or people who work with their hands, obviously. Yes, it could not be more obvious. It is enraging

to me that people who have this history of hard work, don't see that; that it is not a factor in their thinking. So, this idea of sentimentality that you've put your finger on, I think it's very significant. The difference between sentiment and sentimentality, I think is worth discussing. Sentimentality is not simply feeling. It's an attachment to a romantic idea. There's an element of fantasy to sentimentality that distinguishes it from simple sentiment. In *Heat & Light*, there is a passage, where Darren Devlin, who has come back to Bakerton, is at a barbecue at his brother Rich's house and Rich has leased his mineral rights. There's going to be gas drilling on his property and he's very happy about it, and they're having a conversation about this, and Rich says to Darren, "Look, nothing's perfect. The point is, it's an opportunity. I'm not sitting around waiting for the mines to come back. Unlike some people." And Darren says: "Seriously? […] That's the dream?" "They were good jobs," says Rich. Darren says, "Define *good*." (200). This gets us to something really important: that the people in this part of the country who yearn for the days of coal mining to come back have a very romantic understanding of what those jobs were really like. My maternal grandfather was a coal miner. He was what was called a pinner. His job was to hammer in these posts that would hold up the ceiling in the mineshaft that they were excavating. It's an incredibly dangerous job, and he spent most of his day on his hands and knees. Now it's unimaginable that workers could labor in these conditions for years on end. Of course, he died of black lung, as a lot of men there did. But that is not part of the narrative now. When people in that part of the country—and I'm generalizing, of course, not everyone thinks this way—, but the Trump supporters in these communities, when they think about coal mining, they're not picturing a grown man on his hands and knees for eight hours. They're thinking of prosperity and stability and this idea that you could have a high school education and raise your family and educate your children and have job security and belong to a union and rely on that way of life.That is what people are nostalgic for—yet it is a very romanticized picture.

**HP:** Let me take up this ambiguity, because one of the concepts that came to my mind, when I thought about this sort of cognitive or affective dissonance was what Lauren Berlant call "cruel optimism" in their work as a cultural theorist. They say that there are certain American myths—or not only American, obviously global notions—that promise you something, and then you become attached to these myths of this better past etc. However, sometimes you don't realize how harmful this attachment can actually be for your life. I thought that this might also be a way to describe what you unravel in *Heat & Light*. Specifically Rich is a very interesting figure here. He is a very complex character, and, of course, you can dislike him for this or that. Yet on the other hand, he is very vulnerable and helpless in trying to rehearse a certain kind of masculinity that is not really working out so well. Does this idea of a cruel optimism resonate with you?

**JH:** Yes, it does. Well, I think optimism is one of those American ideals and generally, I think it is considered a positive trait. Part of what I find likeable about the character of Rich Devlin is that he is a doer. That he has a plan. He is trying to make something happen, and he is in these bad circumstances, but he has not resigned. He has a plan. He has an idea. He is going to start dairy farming; he's going to buy these milking machines. And he's going to finance this by selling his mineral rights.

**HP:** He works two jobs. He is also a man, who is very concentrated on his goal and very engaged in everything he does.

**JH:**Completely. You know, he is attached to this idea of self-sufficiency. He is not waiting for someone to rescue him. He really believes that he can turn his circumstances around, that it is a question of hard work and having a plan and being smart. In Rich's case, it is not enough. It's a very hard lesson. And it's reflected in people's actual lives: It's in fiction because it's in life. I want to go back to your first question, namely to what degree Bakerton is an invented place and to what degree it actually exists. There is, of course, a lot of invention involved with it, too. It is not an exact replica of my hometown. If it were, I would have kept the same name. The reason I renamed it was to give myself the freedom to modify it as needed, to make my work possible. After having written three books—actually four books now with *Mercy Street*—that connect to Bakerton—, it is a place that really exists to me now. It has a life separate from the real town it was inspired by, and that's because of the people I have invented. At this point, I now have a very long, detailed list of all the characters I have invented, who have a connection to Bakerton. It's an alphabetical list and it gets longer and longer. It's an elaborate form of insanity at this point, like imaginary friends listed alphabetically. When I start to write something new that is set in Bakerton or has a connection to Bakerton, I think immediately, "Well, this character graduated high school in 1990.Who was in his class? Would he know Darren, would he know Gia? He's the same high school class as Darren and Gia. So certainly he would know them." It has made my life more complicated because now I'm writing several generations of the same families. For instance, Rich Devlin's father Dick, who owns the bar, appears very briefly in *Baker Towers*. He was a classmate of Sandy Novak.When they graduated high school, they went to Cleveland together and got jobs in this factory at Fisher

Body, making auto bodies. Dick Devlin is a person who exists in my mind, and I can't, for instance, change his age. I know what year he was born and if I ever want to reference Dick Devlin, he was born in that year; I can't change it now, because I've made it a fact by writing about him. Of course, all these characters are creations, but I feel compelled to be faithful to what I've written before. If I were to write something else about Dick Devlin, I couldn't make him a different kind of person. I couldn't make him younger. I couldn't make him older. I couldn't modify these facts that I've already written. This created Bakerton is a world that exists unto itself now, and it has a population, its citizens have children and grandchildren, and I feel bound by what I have already written. I feel some allegiance to those characters I've already written.

**HP:** So Bakerton is your own fictional universe, and it has a name that is much easier to pronounce than the town William Faulkner invented in his work.

**JH:** That's right! Faulkner's invented place Yoknapatawpha was a county in Mississippi and although it is hard to pronounce, it's no more difficult than many of the names in Mississippi. It is in that way quite realistic. But Bakerton as a name is a lot easier.

**HP:** When you talked about nostalgia earlier, I was also reminded of this book by Zygmunt Bauman, who also uses Trump's campaign slogan as an example to talk about what he conceptualizes as "retrotopia," and he says we're now at this place in time that we think the better things are in the past and we just have to redeem them. So, I thought that retrotopia was a very fitting label for "Make America Great Again," Trump's campaign slogan you mentioned earlier.

**JH:**It is very fitting, and it is also, as we know, very dangerous, because part of this idea that life in the past was better, is that it was a kind of utopia. When you look at the particulars of that life, well, it's before feminism, before any sort of racial equality in this country, and it has set up people to embrace ideas that they would not otherwise have embraced. Here's another example from my hometown: When I was growing up there, the town was entirely white, and it still mostly is. There were no people of other races at all and that was true of all the small towns in that region. I was not aware of racism growing up and in part, this was because there was nothing to stimulate it, there was never any interaction with people of different races. So, there was nothing to make this an issue. But now, when I go back there, I have seen Confederate flags flying. That never, never happened in all the years of my growing up. Of course, Pennsylvania was not part of the Confederacy, it was part of the Union, so it's

historically inaccurate. It is shocking to me now, to see these flags—people will have them on flagpoles outside in their yards, I've seen them on people's trucks. People have really embraced this symbol of racism.There is no pretext that this is our history. It is not. They are embracing this symbol precisely because it is a symbol of racism, and they can do this, and no one can stop them. That is something new. It is historically inaccurate, but it says, if this appeals to you, the past has opened the door to lots of troubling ideologies. I'm not going to say, this place was always racist, and Trump simply enabled people to express that. I'm not convinced that this is entirely true. I think there probably was some racism there, as there is everywhere. But I think a lot of it has been cultivated. And it's partly Trump, it's partly the internet, where people find these online communities where they are introduced to these ideas, where they are validated for expressing these ideas. Those two things operate hand in hand. But I do not accept the argument that "Oh, these people have always been terrible racists and Trump simply enabled them." No, it is more complex than that. There's a grain of truth in that, but it's more complex.

**HP:** I remember that I met a former student of mine when I was on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, which is a place in the Midwest. This was in 2018 and she said that her family was now divided because of the President and that they could not have any family reunions, because some people voted for Trump and the others didn't, and there was just no way that the family could get together.

**JH:**Oh yeah, certainly true. It is a very common American story, that a family's divided about Trump. It was true in my own family and my extended family, not my mother or my brother, but say cousins, more distant relatives. Many of them were Trump supporters and it did become very difficult. I think most American families experienced some version of that.