Abstract
This chapter on Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba (2008) and The Flamethrowers (2013) examines how both novels use historical narratives and marginal passive narrators to depict the consolidation of post-World War II American imperialism. The first section investigates Telex from Cuba’s “energetic materialism” or how sugar fuels nascent US imperialism in Cuba, expressed through the “average heroes” of historical fiction. The latter half examines The Flamethrowers’ triangulation of oil with accelerationist land art in the US, alongside Italy’s automobile industry and Autonomist protest movements, in ways that figure historical fiction’s drive to narrate totality through the ambivalent form of the “peripeteia” . Analysing these two works together unpacks the world-ecological links between American imperialism, oil, and art, amidst deindustrialisation and world revolutionary protest.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Arnold, Drew, and Rachel Kushner. 2013. ‘The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Kushner.’ The Rumpus. 7 August. http://therumpus.net/2013/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-rachel-kushner/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Balestrini, Nanni. 2016. We Want Everything: A Novel, translated by Matt Holden. Kindle Edition. London: Verso, 2016.
Barron, Jesse, and Rachel Kushner. 2013. ‘Insurrection: An Interview with Rachel Kushner.’ The Paris Review. 3 April. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/04/03/insurrection-an-interview-with-rachel-kushner/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007. ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’ In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt, 155–194. 1936. New York: Schocken Books.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2009. Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cokal, Susann. 2008. ‘Livin’ La Vida Local.’ The New York Times. 6 July. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/Cokal-t.html. Accessed 10 April 2019.
Curtin, Philip D. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daly, Selena. 2016. Italian Futurism and the First World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Figlerowicz, Marta. 2013. ‘Made to Burn: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.’ Boston Review. 21 November. http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/kushner-flamethrowers-marta-figlerowicz-italy-new-york-fiction. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Hart, Matthew, Alexander Rocca, and Rachel Kushner. 2015. ‘An Interview with Rachel Kushner.’ Contemporary Literature 56 (2): 192–215.
Hartley, Daniel. 2019. ‘Keeping It Real: Literary Impersonality Under Neoliberalism.’ In World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, 131–156. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hayes, Mark H. 2006. ‘The Transmed and Maghreb Projects: Gas to Europe from North Africa.’ In Natural Gas and Geopolitics from 1970 to 2040, edited by David G. Victor, Amy M. Jaffe, and Mark H. Hayes, 49–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huber, Matthew T. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988. ‘Cognitive Mapping.’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–360. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
———. 2009a. ‘“History and Class Consciousness” as an Unfinished Project.’ In Valences of the Dialectic, 201–222. 1988. London: Verso.
———. 2009b. ‘The Valences of History: Part II; Making History Appear.’ In Valences of the Dialectic, 546–612. London: Verso.
———. 2013. ‘The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible.’ In The Antinomies of Realism, 259–314. London: Verso.
Jelly-Schapiro, Eli. 2019. ‘Literature, Theory, and the Temporalities of Neoliberalism.’ In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 22–42. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press.
Kennedy, Liam, and Stephen Shapiro. 2019. ‘Introduction.’ In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 1–21. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press.
Kirsch, Adam. 2013. ‘The Mythmakers.’ Tablet. 29 May. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/133023/the-mythmakers. Accessed 15 December 2017, 5 April 2019.
Kunzru, Hari, and Rachel Kushner. 2013. ‘Rachel Kushner.’ Bomb Spring (123): 104–109.
Kushner, Rachel. 2008. Telex from Cuba. London: Vintage Books.
———. 2013. The Flamethrowers. London: Vintage Books.
———. 2016. ‘Introduction.’ In We Want Everything: A Novel, author Nanni Balestrini and translated by Matt Holden, ix–xviii. Kindle Edition. London: Verso.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
———. 2014. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. 1973. New York amd London: The New Press.
Macdonald, Graeme. 2013. ‘Research Note: The Resources of Culture.’ Reviews in Cultural Theory 4 (2): 1–24.
Marx, Karl. 1846. ‘Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov in Paris.’ In History Is a Weapon. 28 December, translated by Betty Ross and Peter Ross. 1975. http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.html. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Mills, Nathaniel. 2007. ‘The Dialectic of Electricity: Kenneth Fearing, Walter Benjamin, and a Marxist Aesthetic.’ Journal of Modern Literature 30 (2): 17–41.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books-Penguin Books.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
Niblett, Michael. 2015. ‘Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics.’ In Global Ecologies: Postcolonial Approaches to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Anthony Carrigan, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, and Jill Didur, 268–285. New York: Routledge.
Noys, Benjamin. 2014. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism. Winchester: Zero Books.
Prose, Francine. 1998. ‘Scent of a Woman’s Ink: Are Women Writers Really Inferior?’ Harper’s Magazine. June: 61–70. https://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/scent-of-a-womans-ink/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Queeley, Andrea. 2014. ‘“El Puente”: Transnationalism among Cubans of English-Speaking Caribbean Descent.’ In Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond Disciplinary and National Boundaries, edited by Robert L. Adams Jr., 100–117. Oxford: Routledge.
Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage-Random House.
Seidel, Frederick. 2013. ‘This Book Has Heat.’ The New York Review of Books. 11 July. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/07/11/rachel-kushner-book-has-heat/. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Shamsie, Kamila. 2015. ‘Let’s Have a Year of Publishing Only Women—A Provocation.’ The Guardian. 5 June. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/05/kamila-shamsie-2018-year-publishing-women-no-new-books-men. Accessed 10 April 2019.
Strombeck, Andrew. 2015. ‘The Post-Fordist Motorcycle: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and the 1970s Crisis in Fordist Capitalism.’ Contemporary Literature 56 (3): 450–475.
Tucker-Abramson, Myka. 2019. ‘The Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art.’ In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 73–91. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press.
VIDA: Women for Literary Arts. http://www.vidaweb.org/. Accessed 10 April 2019.
Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Westall, Claire. 2017. ‘World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53 (3): 265–276.
Wood, James. 2013. ‘Youth in Revolt: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.’ The New Yorker. 8 April. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/08/youth-in-revolt. Accessed 5 April 2019.
Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.’ Savacou 5: 95–102.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
De Loughry, T. (2020). “FAC UT ARDEAT”: Rachel Kushner, the World-Historical Novel, and Energetic Materialism. In: The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39325-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39325-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39324-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39325-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)