The Damned of the Alienocene: Reclaiming the Disaster

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Sean Singh Matharoo is a transdisciplinary scholar of French- and English-language speculative literature, media, and philosophy, which he studies in the contexts of postcolonial studies, the energy humanities, and performance studies. As part of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is elaborating and updating his thesis into a book, which is provisionally titled The Damned of the Alienocene: Performatively Modeling Energy Aesthetics for a New Structuralism, in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Matharoo’s research responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources by studying how literature, media, and philosophy contribute to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to find, in language, the gift of solar-powered futures. Matharoo is also a noise musician whose collaborative pieces about the environment may be understood to problematize the presupposition of colonial-racial divisions in thinking and being. He is Book Review Assistant Editor for Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, and is a partner/collaborator with Vision Inclusive.

“The Damned of the Alienocene: Reclaiming the Disaster”is an excerpt from the theoretical introduction of his doctoral thesis, which is about speculative aesthetics and philosophy.