Praktiken und Poetiken der Extraktion

1) Wider research context: Practices and discourses of extraction have received renewed interest. “Extractivism” has been identified as the “dominant paradigm of contemporary capitalism” and neocolonialism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017). Relatedly, the extraction (and subsequent combustion) of geological resources is a major source of anthropogenic climate change, or, as Phillip John Usher puts it, “if we have stumbled into the Anthropocene […], it is not only because we emit but first and foremost because we extract.” (2019). While several studies look at the cultural history of geology and extraction (Ziolkowski 1990; Braungart 2009; Heringman 2004; Groves 2020), the underlying nexus between the formation of geology as scientific discipline and the consolidation of colonialism through practices of exploration and extraction has hitherto been largely neglected.
2) Objectives: The project will bring these debates together and contribute to the investigation of the relationship between literature and geology by analysing the cultural and literary history of practices and discourses of extraction. Through this approach, the project shows how the production of a distinct notion of knowledge was inextricably tied to colonial exploitation and forms of extraction.
3) Approach: Looking at the interplay of 19th-century literary and non-literary texts in Hindi, Urdu, English, and German, the two-part analysis focuses (1) on the close interaction between the formation of geological science and the literary representation and poetics of minerals and mining in German Romanticism and (2) the relationship between colonial and indigenous forms of earthly and mineral knowledge in colonial India. Both contexts are connected through a shared history of geological knowledge formation as well as through a common discourse of exploitation and extraction – be it from stones, minerals, and other earthly (re)sources or from native informants and the vocational knowledge of miners.
4) Level of originality: The proposed project offers a multi-dimensional analysis of extraction as a “set of imaginative, cognitive, economic, and other material operations [through which] nature become[s] figured as a resource.“ (Szemanand Wenzel 2021) By treating extraction as material and discursive practice, the project highlights the epistemic violence of extractivist practices, which supplanted and displaced alternative knowledges about the earth and nature more broadly. Ultimately, the project argues for understanding extractivism as the defining paradigm of knowledge production in the Anthropocene.
5) Primary researchers involved: Philipp Sperner is a scholar of Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. He holds an MA from SOAS and completed his PhD at LMU Munich in 2023 with a dissertation on postcolonial democracy in Hindi literature. He was fellow and visiting scholar at IFK Vienn, AU Delhi, UC Berkeley, and FU Berlin.