A screaming across the sky disturbs a quiet afternoon in the agricultural fields of California's Central Valley as Alejo, a Brown teenage migrant farmworker, looks overhead to discover a mist of pesticides raining down from a biplane. Hearing the biplane's roaring motor as the pesticide rips through his lungs and stomach, he suddenly imagines “sinking into the tar pits” before falling into unconsciousness:
He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. Engulfing his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone. (Viramontes, Under the Feet 78)
This powerful scene in Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) dramatizes the subsumption of Alejo's body into the geological depths of the Central Valley, a major oil extraction region in California. It renders the tar pits as a racialized zone of erasure in which the body is reified into hydrocarbon matter, and, as the novel later suggests, eventually assimilated into the social metabolism of the fossil economy as surplus fuel. If, as Rob Nixon argues, fossil fuels share a “double relationship to planetary time” by encapsulating “a sense of time borrowed against an exhaustible past and an exhaustible future” (69), this passage stages the racialized body's geological transformation into a hydrocarbon assemblage to highlight extraction's double temporality: the abbreviation of human life for its fossilization into inhuman fuel for geological futures. This braiding of geology and race illuminates an architecture of energy extraction that is obscured in dominant Anthropocene narratives of fossil fuel modernity. “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use,” Dipesh Chakrabarty notes. “Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive” (208). But whose freedoms and whose mansion?
In the emerging field termed the energy humanities, literary critics have begun to explore works that address energy's constitutive roles in the environmental, economic, and political making of modernity, prompting new literary-historical periodizations that are framed around energy developments rather than traditional historical markers (Yaeger). According to the prevailing mythos of the Anthropocene, the rise of fossil fuel capitalism accelerated the entwinement of human and natural histories by kick-starting a wave of biospheric rifts on unprecedented planetary scales. The energy transition from biological fuels (wood, tallow, animals, muscle) to fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) triggered new levels of energy productivity and output, marking the monumental transformation of humans from biological to geological agents and the acceleration toward what may be the next mass extinction. What is still largely missing from such orientations is an energy literary criticism and history that attends critically to the longer historical arcs of “racial capitalism” that have paved the way for the Anthropocene's energy geographies (Robinson 2). One significant absence in the case of the United States is the world-historical event of transatlantic slavery that contributed to the consolidatation of the country as a global fossil fuel hegemon. Examining the colonial genealogies of United States energy imperialism, David McDermott Hughes and others argue that slavery emerged in part as an energy economy whose extraction of “embodied, somatic power” enabled the transition to an industrialized hydrocarbon economy (3)—an energy pipeline in which the externalization of slave labor to mass hydrocarbon power eventually paved the way to the contemporary predominance of “petro-capitalism” (Huber xviii).Footnote 1 This alternative vantage point foregrounds the exigency of engaging from below the racial histories that comprise modernity's foundation of fossil-fueled freedoms. The critical task that lies ahead for energy literary critics, then, is to locate fossil fuel modernity's racialized world-making enterprises and to examine how contemporary energy regimes are powered by the mass extraction of racialized bodies across past, present, and future. It is to read for what Patricia Yaeger calls the “energy unconscious” (306) of both literary texts and energy discourses to confront what is at stake when energy politics dehistoricize fossil fuels by erasing their racial geographies of power.
This essay reads a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. While Amitav Ghosh has coined the term “petrofiction” to describe the genre of oil literature (138), the political salience of what Andreas Malm names “fossil fuel fiction” (“This” 121) lies in the fact that, as the aggregate energy imaginary for coal, natural gas, and oil, fossil fuel fiction can dialectically track energy across different developments and transitions through a historical-materialist approach.Footnote 2 This essay expands the purview of fossil fuel fiction as a narrative form by exploring how Viramontes's and Whitehead's novels excavate the racial histories and geographies of extractive energy regimes. By pinpointing the entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales, these novels showcase an energy genealogy that traces contemporary petrocapitalism's extractive enterprises back to earlier histories of colonial and imperial dominion—the United States’ territorial acquisition of Mexico for Viramontes and transatlantic slavery for Whitehead. If energy presents problems of representation and scale because of its global networks of extraction and production, its racialized forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2) resist detection through their incremental effects and unfoldings across the longue durée of United States fossil fuel imperialism.Footnote 3 Such energy regimes enact the material conditions of dispossession, precarity, and violence for racialized bodies that in turn sustain the energy freedoms and uses of contemporary life for others, circumscribing the social and political forms of Black and Brown life. Mapping how these zones of extraction traverse the social and material, the geological and geopolitical, Viramontes's and Whitehead's fossil fuel fictions unearth the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids.
Scholars in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, postcolonial, and critical race studies who have theorized the intersection of race, nature, and empire provide a rubric for investigating the racial politics of the Anthropocene. Sylvia Wynter argues that modernity's environmental and sociopolitical crises are fundamentally organized by the “coloniality of being,” in which the framing of the white Western bourgeois subject as the universal human subject is legitimized through the “systemic stigmatization of the Earth in terms of its being made of a ‘vile and base matter’” (260, 267). To better pinpoint how bodies of color are transmuted into hierarchized taxonomies of matter requires registering what Alexander G. Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages,” an understanding of race “not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (4). Critiquing universalist conceptions of the Anthropocene, the framework that Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race” examines the “inhuman as an analytic with which to scrutinize the traffic between relations of race and material economy and to think race as a material economy that itself emerges through the libidinal economy of geology” (7). Thus, to approach race as a geological formation means locating the “imbrication of inhuman materials and relations of extraction that go beyond a place-based configuration of environmental racism” to examine how “geology makes property relations and properties a relation of subjugation” (6, 4). As these and other numerous works show us, “decolonizing the Anthropocene” (Davis and Todd 761) requires understanding how the epoch “demarcates the temporalities and spatial catastrophe of the planetary through a universalizing idiom and viewpoint that hides the political geographies embedded within the conversion of complex life” (Gómez-Barris 4).Footnote 4
Informed by these theoretical approaches to race and power, this essay explores the geologies of race that fossil fuel fictions articulate in the specific domain of energy. The works examined here demonstrate how energy shapes the social production of race by foregrounding the world-making capacities of “petrocultures,” which name “the material and immaterial infrastructures and superstructures that shape our daily lived realities and govern our choices and mobilities within existing social, economic, and political networks” (Wilson et al. 12). Viramontes's and Whitehead's novels, however, specifically engage the prevailing forms of targeted environmental violence and displacement for Brown and Black lives. These material conditions are enabled by racialized energy discourses that partition bodies into categories of the human and inhuman, citizen and subaltern, consumer and fuel—processes of racialization that variously discipline bodies into biological or geological assemblages in order to harness their social and material power for fossil capital. This racialized conversion of bodies into inhuman labor and surplus converges with the appropriation of hydrocarbon matter into fuel and waste through petrocapitalism's substitutional logic of dispensability and accumulation. At the same time, bodies of color are concretized as sources of material labor to help sustain the fossil economy's vast energy systems and practices. Viramontes and Whitehead show how racialized bodies emerge as georacial assemblages that are assimilated into the fossil fuel ecologies of extraction and infrastructure across multiscalar temporalities. They unsettle the paradigmatic transformation of humans from biological to geological agents that marks the emergence of the Anthropocene subject by excavating a different set of segregated political terrains that discipline the biological or geological formation of racialized bodies.
Migrant farmworkers toiling in the agricultural fields of California's Central Valley during the late twentieth century, a team of sweepers dispatched to eliminate zombies roaming a postapocalyptic Manhattan in the near future, a runaway slave who (time) travels on a literal underground railroad across the Eastern United States during the nineteenth century: these are stories that vary widely in geography and history, genre and form. By considering them together, this essay examines the historical continuities of United States energy imperialism across different political and geographic contexts, a comparative approach that further contextualizes the different structures of racialization that underpin the United States energy empire's multidirectional genres of extractive systems and practices that have been adaptively exported to different geographies of power. The first section reads Under the Feet of Jesus as a fossil fuel fiction that engages with the petrocultures of extraction and displacement for Brown, Chicanx, and Latinx workers in the era of agricultural capitalism.Footnote 5 The novel's georacial imagination connects oil's geological life cycles with the racialized body to highlight the spatial and temporal forms of Brown exhaustion. Viramontes illustrates how petrocapitalism's logic of energy accumulation extracts racialized bodies as forms of surplus labor and energy. The essay then turns to Zone One, understood as a fossil fuel fiction that foregrounds the obfuscation of anti-Black racism in the age of contemporary petrocapitalism. Whitehead shows how the postracial energy ecologies of automobility, urbanization, and infrastructure generate geographies of anti-Black violence and dispossession that are perpetuated through the very erasure of their legibility. The novel interlocks the genealogies of climate change and transatlantic slavery to resituate the stakes of planetary ecological emergency within the Anthropocene's color line. I conclude by connecting Zone One to The Underground Railroad, whose infrastructural imagination helps us reframe the Anthropocene in historical contiguity with plantation slavery. By outlining the coemergent historicity of slavery with energy imperialism, the novel envisions an insurgent form of energy abolition that situates slavery as a georacial formation and structure. Read together, these novels envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives, reorienting the current ecological predicament of planetary carbonization and extinction within the ongoing histories of race and empire.
Geologizing Bodies
Under the Feet of Jesus opens with a scene of automotive displacement: the Brown teenage protagonist, Estrella, and her family wait inside their decrepit Chevy station wagon with all their belongings packed inside, while the mother, Petra, consults a Philips 66 map to find the location of their next labor camp. They know that their lives are “always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest” as much as it depended on the “car running” and the “conditions of the road, . . . which meant they could depend on nothing” (4). Connecting the conditions of labor to the availability of oil—an energy source that also exerts “work”—and its infrastructures, this opening unveils the petrocapitalist geographies that undergird and reproduce the material conditions of racialized precarity and poverty for migrant farmworkers under United States agribusiness. Following an itinerant Mexican American family who works in various agricultural labor camps to harvest grapes, cotton, and other commodities across California's Central Valley, the novel is inspired by the 1965–70 Delano grape strike, a labor strike organized by the United Farm Workers that fought against the exploitation of farmworkers. The story, as Dennis López argues, attends to the politics of “citizenship, labor regimes, and dispossession” that form the “fundamental inequalities at the heart of US social, juridical, and economic relations” (“‘You Talk ’Merican?’” 42) and to concomitant forms of environmental injustice concerning toxicity, food production, and agricultural sustainability.Footnote 6 Crucially, the novel illuminates how automobility, oil extraction, and infrastructure power the material economies and transport networks of United States agribusiness that manufacture poverty for disenfranchised communities of color.
The novel dramatizes the forms of life generated by these energy geographies by organizing the story's logic of displacement and movement around automobility. Narrative disorientation for the reader stems from frequent shifts in setting, as the story hops from one scene to another without explicit locational cues when chronicling the family's drive from one labor camp to another. By inflecting its narrative ordering, space, and time with automobility's racialized structures of feeling, Under the Feet of Jesus delineates the hidden energy geographies that drive its plot: it demonstrates what Stephanie LeMenager argues is the function of plotting in critical oil narratives, “an act of detection that reconstructs the object it pursues . . . an energy resource that seeks to hide itself, to dematerialize as capital” (124). Through this automotive chronotope, Viramontes manifests the oil infrastructures that sustain United States capitalism's fuel-powered commodity networks. As Sarah D. Wald argues, Viramontes “emphasizes ecological systems’ inextricable imbrication with social and economic systems through the metaphor of fossil fuels” (208). However, beyond just providing the metaphor of energy, the novel illustrates how the Central Valley's fossil economy materially and socially shapes the agricultural geographies of labor and capital.
While Californian agriculture provides the novel's central historical backdrops, as critics have argued, Under the Feet of Jesus also addresses another history: the explosive rise of oil extraction in the San Joaquin Valley (the southern region of the Central Valley), which began in the late nineteenth century with the discovery of enormous petroleum reservoirs in Kern County and elsewhere and solidified the region as California's oil capital in the postwar period. By depicting the Central Valley as the nexus of agribusiness and oil extraction, Viramontes shows how the growth of agricultural capitalism—with its dependence on the influx of migrant workers and on the transportation, fuel, and infrastructure systems needed to support the global food economy—relied intimately on the region's petroleum economy. This adjacency of agricultural labor with the oil geologies of the Central Valley is central to Viramontes's georacial imagination, which articulates the modes of petrocapitalist extraction that cut across race and resource, bodies and fuel, biological and geological timeframes.
This georacial imagination is seen in the plotline involving Alejo, who toils in the fields and later encounters Estrella's family. Planning to one day enter high school once he has saved enough money for himself and his family, he dreams of becoming a geology major because of his fascination with rocks: “He loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. . . . [H]e not only became a part of the earth's history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity.” Assured that farmwork, in contrast, is “not forever” (52), Alejo imagines an ecological kinship with the natural world in which his future geological body (“a solid mass of boulder”) will be transformed into a monument to planetary rootedness and coexistence. For this reason, he is especially fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and the life cycle of hydrocarbon matter the Tar Pits showcase, which Alejo values for its geophysical wonder and sublimity. Connecting his life to the scale of geological time allows him to envision a form of ecological dwelling outside of work, which is, in comparison, a miniature time frame. Yet, this idea of geological intimacy, as we have seen, is upended in a cruel turn of events when Alejo, sprayed with pesticides from the biplane, imagines his body sinking into the geological abyss of the tar pits, his bones swallowed whole. In contrast to the geological kinship that Alejo imagines, this subsumption by agricultural petrochemicals reifies the racialized body into surplus hydrocarbon matter, which in turn fuels the biplane and the other apparatuses of petrocapital.
The temporal logic of racialized extraction comes into full view when Alejo—taken under the care of Estrella's family following the pesticide poisoning—is driven to the nearest medical clinic. There, the nurse informs them that Alejo must be taken to a hospital for further services; yet, they cannot afford the medical fees or the gasoline required to get there in the first place. In this moment, Estrella comes to see the networked material economies of labor, infrastructure, transportation, and fuel that help to propel petrocapitalism's racialized world making:
She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse's car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn't the nurse see that? (148)
This energy map braids hydrocarbon, capital, and race across biological and geological time scales, connecting oil's life cycle—extraction, commodification, and distribution—to the racialized body's life cycle of displacement, dispossession, and poverty. What Estrella illuminates here is how oil materializes as the “product of social relations” whose “biophysical capacities only come to be mobilized in specific historical circumstances” (Huber 3, 4)—circumstances that appropriate racialized bodies as “energy money” and “energy matter.” This energy genealogy—whereby the future fossils of today's racialized bodies become money—articulates the double temporality of extraction under petrocapitalism: a future perfect in which racialized bodies will have become future fuel and a past perfect in which they have already become the “bones” that have kept the “cars humming” all this time. This georacial dynamic, moreover, structures the narrative logic of their journey to and from the hospital. When the family's car gets stuck in mud en route to the nurse and Estrella attempts to push the car from behind, she thinks of “the one girl they found in the La Brea Tar Pits” that Alejo tells her about; feeling “as if there wasn't any solid earth to ground herself” as she herself becomes “completely buried in the mud” (129), she watches the tire also sink “deeper into the hole . . . without moving an inch” (130). Later, when Alejo begs Estrella not to leave him alone at the hospital, she has no choice but to leave, since “the car ran outside . . . and the precious gasoline burned” (169). Transposing the geological temporality of fossil fuels into the biopolitical temporality of racialized extraction and violence under petrocapitalism, the novel illustrates the exhaustion and theft of Brown futures for the present sustenance of others’ energy freedoms and wealth.
In addition to extraction's temporal forms, the novel explores the spatial displacements and borders that oil infrastructures generate. Beyond the engagement with the geopolitics of the United States–Mexico borderlands, Viramontes imagines a petro-borderland that produces geographies of dislocation and exclusion that run within national borders. At one point during the family's migration, Petra consults the United States highway map and realizes its “capricious black lines” do not adequately capture the full experience of living near oil infrastructures. Waiting next to the highway where the “heat pulsat[es] from the asphalt” and the oncoming traffic makes crossing dangerous, her family sits immobile beneath “the strutting powerlines” that shuttle electricity across the region's power grid (103). In addition to illustrating racialized environments filled with the risks of heat exhaustion and road-traffic injuries, this scene stages the contrasting mobility of energy and bodies under capitalism: the family's inability to move through these transport infrastructures set against electricity's lightning-speed traversal of vast distances and networks overhead. The contradiction of racial displacement and mobility that underpins energy capitalism thus emerges in full view: the family's ongoing relocation from one camp to another and their inability to travel freely within these infrastructural geographies.
Oil infrastructures not only manufacture these partitioned landscapes of power but also colonize the psychosocial interiority of characters to generate environmental anxiety and trauma. When Petra and her family temporarily live in an apartment that sits right below a freeway interchange with its dizzying “knots of asphalt and cement” and constantly roaring traffic (16), infrastructure inflects the surreal visions that accompany Petra's trauma. To ward off the haunting visions of herself “falling, toppling over a freeway bridge” (17), Petra rolls her rosary beads, praying for religious sanctuary. Yet, an encroaching vision dissolves her prayer into an infrastructural maelstrom that dislocates the boundaries of her interiority and exteriority: the beads, figured as cars on the freeway, are “yanked loose like a broken necklace” and scatter “across the asphalt rolling, rolling” (17). Later on, Estrella's own trauma reveals a similar underpinning: attempting to sleep after a long day of field work, she cannot help but “think of Exits and Entrances, of Stop signs and Yields” and subsequently tries to “blank out the hunger” by thinking instead “of tar oil so black” (89). Exits, entrances, stops, and yields—this automotive interiority showcases how petrocultures structure the very textures of affect, thought, and imagination. Connecting traffic signs to the tar pits, Viramontes folds trauma's psychosocial forms into the site of hydrocarbon extraction and fossilization. These psychological focalizations blur the boundaries between human interiority and infrastructure, and biological and geological life (“hunger” and “tar oil”), to articulate the transformation of Brown bodies into georacial assemblages whose assimilation into petrolic existence extends across past, present, and future.Footnote 7
Against these extractive geographies, Under the Feet of Jesus envisions what José Esteban Muñoz dubs the “brown commons,” a relational ecological lifeworld “shared by a commons that is of and for the multitude,” in which “brown people's very being is always a being-in-common” with other human and nonhuman life forms (2). In a key scene, Petra teaches Estrella what to do if approached by Border Patrol officers: “Tell them que tienes una madre aquí. You are not an orphan, and she pointed a red finger to the earth, Aquí” (63). This passage conveys a “genealogy of place and labor that reclaims personhood” for multiracial lives (López, “‘You Talk ’Merican?’” 41): the multiple descriptions of Petra's red finger, black hair, and labor picking cotton suggest her Indigenous and Afro-Latinx American heritage (42). The scene thus articulates a decolonial reclamation of the land through a multiracial coalitional imaginary that situates twentieth-century petrocapitalism in the longer racial histories of the United States’ acquisition of Mexico in 1848, plantation slavery, and the settler colonial dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples across the American Southwest centuries beforehand.Footnote 8 Fusing the genealogies of colonial and racial exploitation with the geologies of the fossil economy, the novel pinpoints how the extraction of bodies and oil materializes as an entangled set of socioecological processes that abstract bodies and oil as inhuman matter that is out of time and out of place—a dislocation from the earth that disavows the ecological lifeworlds of multiracial communities. Under the Feet of Jesus's decolonial energy imaginary apprehends energy as a historical complex of fossil fuels, race, and labor that continually reassembles the relational configurations and taxonomies of bodies in, at, and as work.
Fossil Fuel Zombies
Under the Feet of Jesus excavates the fossil economy's material conditions of racialized labor, transportation, and poverty for Brown lives by way of its social realism. By comparison, Whitehead's Zone One unearths the racialized energy geographies that resist easy detection and legibility in the postracial United States era of anti-Blackness through its speculative aesthetics. A postapocalyptic zombie novel set in a barricaded region of Manhattan, Zone One portrays a ruined “petrotopia” (LeMenager 74) dominated by energy systems whose attendant cultures of mass automobility become the “final inconveniences of an expiring world” in the aftermath of a zombie pandemic (Whitehead, Zone One 84). Encompassing the barricaded area south of Canal Street down to Wall Street, the novel's eponymous region emerges as a metropolitan fortress of fossil fuel finance and infrastructure whose architecture continually evokes geological time, as “the pitiless rock face of the metropolis” hovers above the streets, while underneath the zone's “Great Wall of Canal extended through the asphalt and deep into the Earth's crust” (322, 254). Within these city walls, the Black protagonist, nicknamed Mark Spitz (a name ironically given to him by white workers after the white Olympic champion swimmer), is part of a “sweeper” unit that scouts the streets to eliminate straggling zombies. Along with other various divisions, the unit's job is to make the city habitable once more for a nebulous elite echelon that withdrew from the city and is safely stationed in Buffalo. As in Viramontes's novel, the intersections of race, labor, and infrastructure become central to Zone One; however, Whitehead's georacial imagination pursues the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 6) that takes shape in the postracial era of anti-Black petrocapitalism.
Zone One illuminates how anti-Blackness is constitutive of United States postracialism through its experimentation with the generic forms of postapocalyptic fiction. The novel's deft rejoinder to postracialism emerges through a key narrative deferral: Mark's race is only revealed at the very end of the novel, right as the zombies break open the city barricades. Ramón Saldívar thus reads Zone One as an example of “postrace fiction,” narratives whose racial world-making strategies experiment with genre, irony, mimesis, and speculation to self-reflexively critique postracial discourses and engage new forms of racialization in the contemporary period.Footnote 9 For Saldívar, Whitehead's narrative deferral shows how “it may well be necessary first to imagine the end of the world before we may imagine the historical end of racialization and racism” (“Second Elevation” 13). Seen this way, the novel's plot stages a twofold apocalypse: the first narrates the zombie infiltration of New York City, while the second reveals “the fragility of the fictional US nation in postapocalypse reconstruction and . . . the protagonist's heretofore unnarrated Blackness” (Ardoin 172). This postracial prolepsis and narrative delay become central to the logic of the novel's georacial imagination, as its oblique entanglement of race and fossil fuels registers petrocapitalism's systematically concealed extraction of Black lives. Examining its environmental dimensions, Kate Marshall reads Zone One as an Anthropocene novel whose “experiments in nonhuman viewpoints within the most human of geological formations rather than in speculative alternative geologies” capture the arrival of “a geological epoch that has become self-aware” (534). This analysis, however, misses how the novel's entwined postrace and geological aesthetics register a specific inhuman viewpoint of the Anthropocene in which Blackness emerges as an “intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity” through a “geologic axiom of the inhuman in which nonbeing was made, reproduced, and circulated as flesh” (Yusoff xii, 5). Whitehead's georacial imagination assembles an energy genealogy in which United States petrocapitalism's extractive practices unfold within the anti-Black geographies of transatlantic slavery, urbanization, and climate change.
Against this backdrop, the zombie narrative in Zone One functions as a (post)racial allegory of slavery that delineates the historical continuities between contemporary petrocapitalism and slavery.Footnote 10 This is made clear by Buffalo's city rehabilitation project: tellingly named “reconstruction,” the enterprise involves mobilizing a military police state to eradicate the city zombies in order for Buffalo's wealthy echelon to regentrify New York City. This allegorical mapping of post–Civil War Reconstruction onto postapocalyptic Manhattan's fossil fuel fortress refuses the historical foreclosure of slavery, and instead frames automobility, gentrification, and infrastructure as the “reconstructed” geographies of contemporary anti-Black violence and death—a “necropolis” (103) whose rising towers “trudged like slaves higher and higher into midtown” (9). Haunting Zone One's energy infrastructure landscapes, zombies materialize as metonyms of slavery and its afterlives, and this displaced racial signification registers, as Jessica Hurley argues, a “postracial epistemology of the zombie's skin, which holds in tension a black past with an always-disintegrating present whiteness” (321). Thus, the simultaneity of the zombie outbreak and the racial revelation of Mark frames the protagonist as “the black double of the zombie” (324), a doubling that generates an unstable postracial epistemology central to the novel's ending. Embodying the synthesis of life and death, Zone One's zombies exemplify the undead nature of fossil fuels: reemerging to energetic life from extinction, they materialize in Manhattan's fossil economy as reanimated life, power, surplus. At the same time, they encapsulate what Kaiama L. Glover argues is the central feature of the Haitian zombie, a “thingified non-person reduced to its productive capacity” (59). This dialectic of life and death, dynamism and stasis, is staged by the two types of zombies—the aggressive, fast-moving “skels” and the passive, unmoving “stragglers”—that roam Manhattan. Situated at the locus of biopower and necropower, Whitehead's fossil fuel zombies summon the racial unconscious of energy modernity's extractive histories, materializing as the “ghosts of geology's epistemic and material modes of categorization and dispossession” (Yusoff xii).
Zone One's georacial imagination conjoins the life cycles of zombies and fossil fuels to diagram the racialized body's metabolic conversion from labor and fuel to waste. This is illustrated by Buffalo's process for eliminating zombies for the reconstruction project: when wandering zombies are captured by sweepers, disposal teams use incinerators to turn them into the “particulate by-product of high-temperature combustion” (234), a process that replicates the industrial production of energy pollution resulting from coal ash and petroleum coke (the fugitive dust that is the by-product of oil refinement). Mark observes the parallels between this zombie incineration and the city's air pollution and mass automobility during the prepandemic past: he recalls the days when he “looked past the roaring, belching machine to traffic signs that had directed drivers to the sluice leading to New Jersey” and realized that the highway moved “the little bodies into a channel the same way the smokestack directed the little flakes through its insides and out into the air” (233). Moreover, when the rain liquifies the floating zombie ash, it reminds Mark of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath, “of when he visited his cousins in Florida and he emerged from the ocean with brown globs of oil on his chest and legs, the stuff still drifting ashore so long after the big spill” (79). This is a zombie ash ecology, then, that replicates the social metabolism of the oil economy by entangling fossil fuels and racialized bodies in a feedback loop of energy extraction, combustion, dispersal, and pollution. It is a conversion of bodies into the “detritus that passed for identity, the particulate remains of twenty-first-century existence,” one in which incinerated zombies finally become assimilated into the city's very oil infrastructures as “mammoth scorched patches of asphalt” (63, 202). Seen this way, zombies materialize as georacial assemblages whose double signification as Blackness and hydrocarbon matter diagrams extractive capitalism's social reproduction of Blackness as an inhuman stratum of energy modernity.
The city's zombie ash ecology literalizes Christina Sharpe's contention that “antiblackness is pervasive as climate” and that, in its ubiquity and invisibility, anti-Blackness becomes “the atmospheric condition of time and place . . . [and] produces new ecologies” (106). Significantly, the pervasive presence of ash throughout the city induces constant environmental paranoia and anxiety for Mark during his sweeps: for him, “it was everywhere. In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body” (233). By contrast, the other sweepers do not share his “perception of the ash, its constancy and pervasiveness” (232). While this passage allegorizes the anti-Black denialism of postracial discourses, it also depicts a postracial ecology in which racial forms of energy violence resist easy localization like the weather itself, signaling the often circuitous and invisible routes through which environmental hazard manifests itself for Black bodies. The only certain and legible forms of human identification in this postapocalyptic, postracial world are the driver's licenses that Mark and the sweepers collect as they roam the city. Described as “fossil evidence,” the residents’ licenses are the only “indicators of their brief appearance on the planet” (63). This interpellation of bodies as undead automobile drivers illustrates the fragmentation of the body into frozen, deep-time hydrocarbons (the plastic license photographs and their eventual future status as fossilized remains). It captures, like Viramontes's georacial imagination, the body's double temporality under energy capitalism: the truncation of human life for the accumulation of future fuel and waste. As “the degraded remnants of the people described on the things’ driver's licenses” (266), zombies emerge as carbon copies of human life turned petrolic.
Moreover, the novel ultimately fashions its (post)racial zombie narrative into a climate change allegory by literalizing the description of the zombies as “a kind of weather,” such that the zombie plague emerges alongside “[t]hat other, less flamboyant, more deliberate ruination altering the planet's climate [that] had been under way for more than a hundred years” (221, 240). The key description of the zombie multitude that floods the city's streets upon breaking through the barricades articulates this coalescent figuration: “The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass and the computer-generated swells mounted to drown the great metropolis. Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead” (302). This metonymic figuration of zombies as the environmental calamity of climate change—the rising sea levels that flood Manhattan—occasions a narrative rupture between the prepandemic past and a postapocalyptic present, a rupture whereby the zombie flood destroys the metropolitan hub of fossil fuel finance and infrastructure. Linking rising waters and shifting climates to fossil fuels and human bodies, the novel's final metaphoric transposition turns fossil fuel zombies into climate change zombies.
This multifaceted allegorization marks the Anthropocene as a period that begins with the world-historical event of slavery by rerouting climate change's genealogical origins to the long racial histories of anti-Blackness. Describing the zombie multitude as “the black tide [that] had rolled in everywhere, [where] no place was spared this deluge, [and] everyone was drowning” (312), this ending conjures the spectral image of slaves reemerging from the depths of the Middle Passage to flood Zone One's streets. Like Mark's racial revelation, this allegorical rupture forces the reader to reread the spectres of slavery hidden within Manhattan's cityscapes earlier in the novel: during one of Mark's zombie hunts on the I-95 highway as a former “wrecker” (a worker who creates transport paths by hauling away cars with tow and boom trucks), an unexpected group of zombies huddled inside an eighteen-wheeler truck attack the sweeper crew once the doors are opened. Only in retrospect does this description of the tightly packed zombies—who are possibly en route for a “government job” where they were “earmarked for experiments” (179)—evoke the image of the slave ship, such that the automobile emerges as a new permutation of what Paul Gilroy calls the chronotope of the slave ship, a “central organising symbol” of slavery that emerges as a “living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (4). As the contemporary chronotope of the slave ship, Whitehead's automobiles register the vehicular afterlives of anti-Black violence and extraction in the contemporary landscapes of police brutality, pollution, and energy capitalism. Shaped by climate change, slavery, and petroculture, this kaleidoscopic landscape illustrates Katherine McKittrick's theorization of “plantation futures,” which names the spatiotemporalities of contemporary urban ecologies in which the “legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit” (2). Thus, when Mark meets the zombies face-to-face on the streets in the final encounter, he realizes that “[i]t was not the dead that passed through the barrier but the wasteland itself. . . . It embraced him; he slid inside it” (Whitehead, Zone One 312). Walking “into the sea of the undead,” which he realizes was “where he belonged” (322, 312), Mark submerges into the geological depths of Zone One, a contemporary manifestation of what Frantz Fanon calls the “zone of nonbeing” (xii) in which the historical legacy and longevity of the Middle Passage fuses to the contemporary era of fossil capitalism. Interweaving carbon with the Black body, the novel unearths the hidden, geological color line of the Anthropocene.
But to critically apprehend the city's racial energy geographies in the postracial environmental apocalypse poses fundamental challenges of cognitive mapping. Zone One imparts this problem of visibility and perspective through the character called the Quiet Storm, a helicopter pilot whose job as a wrecker involves relocating abandoned cars to clear transport routes in and out of the city. She is also a kind of land artist who creates mysterious arrangements of cars on the streets and highways as she sees fit. Only in the novel's climax does Mark recount a memory that captures the “clandestine heart of the Quiet Storm's maneuvers” (288), a time when he was onboard the helicopter with her. Seeing the metropolis from a bird's-eye view, Mark discerns the Quiet Storm's bizarre automotive architecture of the city in toto:
He finally saw it from above, what she had carved into the interstate. While the other wreckers, indeed all the other survivors, could only perceive the wasteland on its edge, the Quiet Storm was in the sky, inventing her alphabet and making declarations in a row of five green hatchbacks parked perpendicular to the median, in a sequence of black-and-white luxury sedans arranged nose to nose two miles down the road, in a burst of ten minivans in glinting enamel. . . . The grammar lurked in the numbers and colors, the meaning encoded in the spaces between the vehicular syllables, half a mile, quarter mile. Five jeeps lined up south by southwest on a north-south stretch of highway: This was one volley of energy, uncontained by the routes carved out by settlers two hundred years before, or reified by urban planners steering the populace toward the developers’ shopping centers. Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching on an arrow aimed at—what? Tomorrow? What readers? (289)
The Quiet Storm's inhuman map, as Marshall aptly argues, presents a “new alphabet, grammar, and significantly, readership of the Anthropocene” that is scaled “for a kind of geological time that is more indifferent to the finite time in which her body is embedded” (535). Her land art, however, is also a blueprint of the Anthropocene that orients petroculture at the center of its epochal formation, a future message written by the arrangement of automobiles whose “vehicular syllables” are graphed on the city's infrastructural syntax. Through her project, automobiles become future geological monuments whose uncontainable “volley of energy” will outlast and defy human histories of settler colonialism, capitalism, and urbanization. Addressing the readership of “Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective” (Whitehead, Zone One 290), this automotive focalization destabilizes the legibility of human agency when viewed from the inhuman horizons of geological futures. If such prolepsis helps articulate the immediacy of the present ecological emergency, Zone One also shows how this planetary perspective from nowhere that comprises the universalizing viewpoint of the Anthropocene camouflages the forms of racial imperialism that give shape to ecological catastrophe.
Against this backdrop, Whitehead's climate change zombies—in obverse relation to the narrative twist concerning Mark's racial revelation—become expanded floating signifiers that encompass the master category of Homo sapiens by the novel's end. Zone One calls into question the political stakes of what Chakrabarty terms the Anthropocene's “planetary conjuncture” (199), in which the collapse of human and natural histories necessitates a new negative universal form of species thinking. As the zombies infiltrate Manhattan,
[a]ll the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person. Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue. As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket. (Whitehead, Zone One 303)
This passage allegorizes humanity's entrance into its self-made geological epoch (“this concrete canyon”) as a unified species (“Every race, color, and creed”), and dramatizes through the zombie the “placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of danger that is climate change” (Chakrabarty 221). The zombie deluge materializes as an ecological flashpoint that traverses socioeconomic, racial, national, and cultural differences, echoing Chakrabarty's point that “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged” (221). Yet the novel ironizes the universalizing mythos of planetary catastrophe by comparing it to multiculturalism's homogenizing logic (“per the myth of this melting-pot city”), holding up to scrutiny the divergent stakes of climate change's universal and particular impacts, shared and uneven consequences. This ending articulates the contradictions that race acquires in the Anthropocene's negative universal history: the erasure of race in the geological epoch of planetary human agency on the one hand, and the proliferation of racialized extractive geographies by planetary energy imperialism on the other. Whitehead's georacial imagination shows how these racial contradictions constitute the political rift of the postracial Anthropocene.
Zombies embody the fundamental contradiction of metabolic life: as the living dead, they actualize the fantasy of infinite energy as persistent life forms that exist without caloric expenditure. Flooding the city and overthrowing Buffalo's reconstruction project, the zombies short-circuit the imperial fictions of petrocapitalism: the prospect of infinite accumulation for contemporary energy systems that are fueled by the reification of Black bodies as modernity's disposable strata. When Mark confronts the zombie multitude at street level, he is finally able to “read their inhuman scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town” (Whitehead, Zone One 307). This recalcitrant assembly orchestrates an occupation that refuses extraction's historical erasures. The zombies’ reclamation of the city finally emerges as a form of multihistorical presence that ruptures the sublimation of race in the postracial fossil economy, thereby transforming the “plantation as a location that might also open up a discussion of black life within the context of contemporary global cities and futures” (McKittrick 5).
Infrastructural Insurgency in the Geological Wake
Before the climactic day when the zombies breach Zone One's barricades, Mark is making his round of sweeps in the underground subway tunnels. Walking underneath the city, he recalls that, unlike the privatized terrain of automotive infrastructures above, the subway was the “great leveler” where “no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another” (Whitehead, Zone One 266, 267). Turning the subway into the central symbol of an infrastructural commons, this partitioned setting between the privatized (above ground) and public (underground) beckons us to apprehend energy capital's zoned geographies of power at the moment of narrative rupture. Transportation infrastructure, as in Viramontes's novel, becomes the key domain for imagining alternative energy futures beyond fossil fuel modernity's world-making enterprises.
This kind of stratified infrastructural imagination also structures Whitehead's later novel The Underground Railroad, a speculative neo–slave narrative that takes as its premise a literal underground railroad network that transports runaway slaves during the nineteenth century. The protagonist, Cora, a runaway slave from Georgia, travels not only to different states across the American East but also across time to different histories of racial regimes across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with oblique allusions to the Final Solution during World War II, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 to 1972, and contemporary anti-Black police brutality. The railroad becomes a kind of infrastructural time machine: a mobile network that traverses space and time, it assembles a speculative historiography in which the past and future are enfolded into the geographies of the nineteenth-century narrative present. If the novel in this way, as Yogita Goyal argues, “mines the speculative power of racial allegory to disturb the valence of both fable and history” (140), it also asks us to consider the valence of history and fuel by literalizing the Underground Railroad as a material network of infrastructure and fuel systems. Posing the question of that “inconceivable source” that built and powered the transhistorical network (Whitehead, Underground Railroad 67), the novel carries the reader through the longue durée of United States energy regimes across slavery and its historical afterlives and adjacencies.
By foregrounding coal as the primary fuel that powers the Underground Railroad, the novel alludes to another key racist history that traverses multiple centuries: the enslavement and exploitation of Black people for coal extraction that began in the eighteenth century and continued well into the twentieth.Footnote 11 The Underground Railroad incorporates these histories of coal extraction into the time-traveling railroad to pose the question of slavery's role and relation to the rise of United States fossil fuel imperialism across multiple time spans. However, even as she learns that the underground train itself is primarily powered by coal, Cora realizes that this energy ecology does not capture the larger power that makes the railroad first and foremost possible. In the novel's climactic end, she maneuvers an uncrewed railroad cart herself toward safety:
She discovered a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike. She never got Royal to tell her about the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance of slaves like her. Who stood with all those other souls who took runaways into their homes, fed them, carried them north on their backs, died for them. The station masters and conductors and sympathizers. Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. . . . The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. (303–04)
Is Cora traveling or digging through the tunnel? Blurring the action of transportation and geological excavation, this scene prompts us to connect the Underground Railroad's infrastructure to its wider and hidden energy geographies. On the one hand, the novel's energy genealogy alludes to the enslavement of Black people for coal extraction by tracking the transition and continuation of slavery's energy economy from human labor to coal power. The above passage pinpoints the racialized fuel discourses that power the energy imperialism of the United States—a country, as Cora observes, built on “[s]tolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood” (117). On the other hand, the passage envisions an infrastructural network that is powered by a collective of Black resistance—along with the other “conductors and sympathizers”—that transforms fugitivity into speculative Afrofuturist freedom. Emerging from the “depths of the earth,” Whitehead's Underground Railroad imagines a form of infrastructural insurgency in the geological wake of slavery.
While living on the plantation, Cora realized that “she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness” (179). If the Underground Railroad moves the reader forward into slavery's historical afterlives, this scene also suggests how to travel back from the Anthropocene to read the plantation as a planet, a place “big in its smallness.” This figuration of the plantation as planet also underpins Zone One: before he is engulfed by the ocean of zombies, Mark wonders whether the zombie outbreak was “happening everywhere, all over the world” (309). In this moment, he remembers the time he spent in the ironically named farmland Happy Acres, one of Buffalo's settlement camps surrounded by barbed wire and electric fencing that suggestively evokes the plantation in conjunction with Zone One's reconstruction project. Juxtaposing plantation with petroculture, Whitehead reframes the Anthropocene by situating plantation slavery and empire at the center of the epochal formation of planetary ecological crisis. At the same time, the deliberately indirect and ironic connections that Whitehead draws between slavery and contemporary anti-Black racism force us to confront what Goyal argues are the political stakes of analogy in which “the power and prominence of slavery as a prism though which conceptions of black humanity, agency, and futurity refract and become visible” foreground the “contradictions race acquires” as it travels across different geographic and historical contexts (9). This kind of insurgent energy imaginary, central to both Zone One and The Underground Railroad, invites a mode of critical analogy that mobilizes correspondence and difference—rather than equivalence and reductionism—to better elucidate the particularities of slavery and its afterlives without losing sight of their evolving continuities. It conceptualizes history as an infrastructure that can transport the present beyond the confines of its own perpetual foreclosure.
Unearthing the valence of fossil power and the geologies of race, Viramontes's and Whitehead's fossil fuel fictions crystallize decolonial and abolitionist energy imaginaries that situate energy justice as the twofold abolition of racial capitalism and its energy systems that power the United States imperial nation. By assembling fossil fuel modernity's racialized terrains of extraction and infrastructure, these novels trace empire's historical footprints within contemporary life, to search “not for climate in history, but for history in climate” (Malm, Fossil Capital 6). To do so requires excavating the geographies and histories of racial capitalism that constellate the larger assemblages of United States energy empire and their regimes of extraction, accumulation, and dispossession. If energy narratives and discourses so often posit the Anthropocenic challenges of representation, causality, and scale, Viramontes and Whitehead show how such epistemic obfuscations and limitations are catalyzed by energy imperialism's world making and social reproduction of racial petrocapitalist life. The very energy freedoms, desires, and systems housed by the fossil economy are underpinned by the racial injustices that subtend fuel's geohistories. What we need is an energy literary criticism that refuses to decouple the colonial matters of race from the carbonized matters of energy, in which the fight for a post-fossil future is the fight for a decolonial and abolitionist future. The problem of the energy epoch is the problem of the color line (Du Bois 3).
