Visualizing Resource Extraction, 1840–1910

This group of commentary essays explores the pervasive profit-seeking extraction of the planet’s organic and inorganic materials during the nineteenth century, a mindset that scholars in environmental humanities identify as extractivism. The authors attend to art and visual culture in which extractive activities, processes, and attitudes reflected the century’s intensifying demand for resources that fueled the forces of colonization and dispossession. With ecocritical and new materialist approaches in mind, these scholars address how image-makers registered increasing violence against places, people, animals, plants, and abiotic entities. But they also encourage reading images and objects against the grain of their ostensible messages to discover modes of resistance to extractive rapacity and stories that anticipate the present awareness of planetary limits.