Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy

The following post serves as an overview to the special issue edited by Gianfranco Selgas and Manuel Silva-Ferrer “Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy” published in Environmental Humanities in the spring of 2025. The special issue brings together research by Gabriel Rudas Burgos, Gina Saraceni, Paul Merchant, raúl rodríguez freire, and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, in addition to a foreword by Imre Szeman and an introductory piece authored by Selgas and Silva-Ferrer, exploring various modes of examining, looking at, and interpreting the intersections between energy, societal practices, and culture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. The special issue contributes to the effort of signalling the interconnection of Latin America and the global South with the rest of the world for a deeper comprehension of energy, exploring how Latin American cultures and societies are deeply affected by and entangled with the infrastructure and ontological dimension of energy and the materialities that make energy possible. You can read the introductory essay here. 

Since the oil crisis in 1973, energy consumption by households, industry, and agriculture has doubled. A report by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) predicts rising oil and gas demand well beyond 2030, calling for trillions in new fossil fuel investments. By 2050, the European Union will demand up to ninety times more rare earth elements for digital technologies and renewable energy infrastructure than it does today. According to the United Nations’ Global Resources Outlook report, raw material extraction is projected to rise by 60 percent by 2060. Most of these materials will be mined, extracted, and captured in resource-rich regions of the global South, like Latin America. Since the colonial era, the region has been a key supplier of coal, copper, gold, iron, oil, silver, and various non-metallic minerals, holding some of the largest reserves of petroleum, gas, and lithium on the planet.

As geopolitics and foreign capital investment reshape the geography of energy transition and digitalisation, Latin America remains central to both extractivism and its contestation through decolonial epistemologies, sociocultural resistance, and political transformation. Energy Matters, as an evolving project that in its first stage seeks to expand the study of intersections between energy, societal practices, and culture, sketches out a Latin American cultural critique of energy and the environment by interrogating the conventions that shape our relationship with energy sources. From sociocultural engagements with coal and petroleum to hydropower and lithium, it charts the contradictions between the destructive legacy of fossil fuel extraction and the ostensibly “green” future promised by the transition to renewables, examining how these dynamics are deeply embedded in histories of plunder, accumulation, and, in most cases, devastation.

Energy Matters explores the “capacious meaning of energy” (Daggett 2019), exposing the material, social, and cultural conditions of its production and consumption. As Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2020) argue, energy becomes a commodity only when extracted from the web of life and inserted into capitalist markets. This commodification obscures the labour involved and the land exploited in its production, detaching energy from its origins. Denise Ferreira Da Silva (2018) further complicates this by asserting that matter and energy are equivalent, particularly in postcolonial, resource-exporting societies like those in Latin America. In these territories, extraction is sustained by colonial juridical mechanisms and racialised tools of accumulation, perpetuated today by nation-states and global capitalism.

Building on Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2020) describe capitalist commodification as the robbery of nature. Marx (1904; 1982) argued that capitalism disrupts the metabolic exchange between humans and the earth by preventing nutrients from returning to the soil, prioritizing profit over ecological balance. This rift hinges on the alienation of nature, reduced to an external commodity for exploitation rather than an integral part of life. Commodification relies on abstraction, fetishisation, and mystification, obscuring the social and ecological costs of extraction. As Marx noted, the mode of production shapes social, political, and cultural life, with capital as a system of domination that produces distorted yet normalized appearances. Energy Matters engages these critiques, positioning Latin America as pivotal to understanding global energy supply chains and the sociocultural construction of energy.

Latin America’s colonial legacies—racial, ethnic, and gendered—have entrenched radical socioeconomic inequalities, exacerbated by twentieth-century industrialisation and modernisation policies. Dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto 1978), developed in the region during the 1960s and 1970s, highlighted how the periphery was confined to exporting raw materials, reinforcing colonial patterns. Central to its analysis was the unequal international specialisation of the economy, in which the periphery was limited to export-oriented agricultural and mining activities as a continuation of the colonial legacy. In these exchanges, industrialisation in the periphery was only possible under conditions of low wages which, along with increased productivity, contributed to the consolidation of unequal exchange. While recent decades have seen progress in social inclusion, socio-environmental justice remains elusive. Extractivism has been central to this history, transforming colonies into nature-exporting societies that fuel metropolitan capitalism. In the twenty-first century, neo-extractivism—driven by the economic rise of China and other Asian nations—has further expanded these frontiers.

Maristella Svampa (2019) defines neo-extractivism as a Latin American phenomenon tied to the commodity consensus, where primary exports fuelled economic growth (2000–2014). This model exposes the socioecological crisis of modernity, linking capital’s social metabolism to unchecked resource consumption. Yet, as Coronil (1997; 2019) demonstrated in his study of Venezuelan oil politics, extraction is not merely technical; it shapes social and political agents, embedding itself in cultural imaginaries. Commodities, Coronil argues, are not passive objects but active forces that constrain and empower societies. Neo-extractivism thus reorganises states, cultures, and subjectivities, reflecting what Kathryn Yusoff (2017) has called the geosocial strata—where extraction structures geopolitical and social fields.

In that sense, Energy Matters questions how coal and oil extracted from the subsoil in Colombia and Venezuela, water turned by mega-dams into hydropower in Brazil, and lithium extraction resulting from massive brine evaporation in Argentina and Chile have significantly influenced the daily practices that emerge from an energy-hungry world. To apprehend this influence, we follow Coronil’s proposal of a comprehensive view of capitalism and the international division of labour as an international division of nations, nature, and of the geopolitical units, envisaging a global, non-Eurocentric conceptualisation that continues to reflect historical inequalities in power and development among national states. By being attentive to what Thea Riofrancos (2020) describes as the constitutive territorial unevenness of global capitalism and the fractal structure of cores and peripheries reproduced via expanding extractive frontiers, Energy Matters proposes a situated cultural critique of energy to reposition Latin America from the periphery to the centre of discussions on energy.

How might a Latin American cultural critique of energy reconceive the relevance of cultural history and aesthetics considering the energy regimes that underwrite it? Aesthetic practices, as Jacques Rancière (2004) puts it, regulate what is perceptible and sayable within political and cultural realms. These distributions influence perceptions and reinforce ideologies, maintaining hierarchies, inequalities, and systems of exclusion by determining who participates in public discourse, who receives attention and recognition, and whose voices are marginalised or silenced. But they are not merely reflections of existing power structures. These practices also challenge accumulation regimes that exploit life, revealing alternative epistemologies, social habits, and imaginaries.

A Latin American cultural critique of energy thus positions culture as political ecology, illuminating energy’s dominant discourses while exploring speculative and historical alternatives. It opens critical spaces to illuminate the multifaceted dimensions of energy, its dominant discourses, and hegemonic narratives. In engaging with the modes by which coal, hydropower, oil, and lithium are grasped by a multiplicity of discursive, visual, speculative, and historical forms, it advances conceptualisations and theorisations informed by regional, national, and global socioenvironmental and sociocultural histories. Taking energy seriously in relation to a Latin American cultural critique of energy demands sustained approaches to advance material and historical engagements and explore new forms of being, ethics, and politics in relation to the circuits of industrial production on a logistically hyperconnected planet, as well as the geological materiality of our daily life grounded in the robbery of nature. Even though energy is conceptualised as a global network that enables capitalism, technological development, and contemporary subjectivities, the experience of such a network differs depending on where energy is produced and consumed, and to what degree energy and its infrastructures are a common good benefiting the many. In doing so, Energy Matters offers pieces of a larger framework, signalling the centrality of Latin America for a deeper comprehension of energy, and how Latin American cultures and societies are deeply affected by and entangled with the infrastructure and ontological dimension of energy and the materialities that make energy possible.

Author

Gianfranco Selgas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London (UCL), based at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (SELCS-CMII). His research and teaching investigate the cultural, media, and political ecology of nature extraction and energy consumption across Latin America and the Caribbean, drawing on critical social theory, environmental and development history, and political ecology. He was co-editor of Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy, a special issue of Environmental Humanities that positions Latin America at the center of global energy debates. His current research projects include Entangled Materialities, a cultural and environmental history of extractive zones in Venezuela (1890–1980), and Archives of the Planetary Mine, which explores the geohistorical and socioecological dimensions of mineral extraction in the Global South. Selgas’s scholarship has received multiple accolades, including the “Best Article on Venezuela” (Humanities) award from LASA in 2021, the Post-Doctoral Research Award from the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) in 2023, and runner-up in CEISAL’s 2025 Professor Andrzej Dembicz Award for Best Doctoral Thesis on Latin America and the Caribbean. He is also a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews, and a guest researcher at the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering (SEED) at KTH in Stockholm.

References

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