Life of the Mined: Gender and Race in the Long Coal Century

Abstract

This project examines how literary and cultural texts have mediated the global history of coal extraction through the intertwined lenses of gender and race. While much scholarship in energy humanities and environmental history focuses on material infrastructures and ecological consequences, this dissertation foregrounds literary analysis to trace how extractive capitalism becomes thinkable, desirable, and durable through narrative form, aesthetic conventions, and symbolic investments. Spanning the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, and focused primarily on the extraction zone known as “Appalachia,” this project conceptualizes “the long coal century” as a transnational and transhistorical period shaped by the cultural labor of mining fictions. Each chapter pairs literary and cinematic texts with theoretical insights from feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, and queer and trans studies to uncover how extraction structures not only economies and ecologies, but also imaginaries of personhood, community, and survival. By reading literature as both a witness to and agent of extractive modernity, Life of the Mined argues for the centrality of narrative in shaping the historical and affective contours of energy regimes, and reimagines literary analysis as essential to understanding the uneven violences and speculative futures of the Anthropocene.