Description
Book SynopsisViolent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkagesland linesbetween infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the electric climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.
Trade Review"This inclusion of energy in telling the story of sexual modernity and the framework of land lines will be of value to scholars in queer studies, energy and environmental humanities, and studies of the North American West." * Western American Literature *
Table of ContentsContents
List of Figures
Preface: Rooted Kinship
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Land Lines of Violent Inheritance
1. Cartographies of Sexual Modernity
2. Settler Intimacies and the Social Life of the Archive
3. Childhood and Settler Aesthetics of Violence
4. Affected Persons, Sexual Transits, and Contested Public Memories
5. Petroculture and Intimate Atmospheres
Conclusion: Infrastructures of Feeling and Queer
Collaborative Stewardship
Notes
Bibliography
Index
