Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling

by Jamie L. Jones

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of "energy" in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power. She argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations.

Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores the histories of race, labor, and energy consumption in the nineteenth-century United States through the lens of the whaling industry's legacy. In terms of how they view power, Americans are, she argues, still living in the shadow of the whale.

262 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2023

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important and well researched piece of scholarship that skillfully does what good history should. It explores the past to show how we got here but also gives us clues as to how we might move forward. In this case Jones looks at how the transition from whale based energy was used by petrochemical energy to make a case for modernity. In doing so we also see the way that nostalgia limits our understanding of the truth and in doing so establishes a narrative that centers a fictional “real American” fable that serves to perpetuate settler colonialism and white supremacy.

What really sets this book apart is the courage with which Jones asks us to learn from the past. From the hagiography of coal miners, to the Indigenous erasure, to the slow violence petrochemicals inflict on us, this book keeps us looking straight ahead and daring us not to flinch as we stare into the Anthropocene.