to profit. 1 The term has emerged out of a Latin American development studies context to assume a place beside related concepts of the environmental and energy humanities such as the 'anthropocene' and 'petrocultures'. 2 Yet in some ways, extractivism is as old as modernity itself, especially if we think about the latter as a series of interrelated developments on an increasingly large scale, in which telluric matter, removed and processed, yielded the raw material of an ongoing liberatory project, a project that carried the unintended consequences of ever-intensifying environmental degradation and human immiseration. As a process of transferring raw materials from underdeveloped peripheries to a highly developed core, underwriting the uneven logic of capitalist development over its longue durée, extractivism shows no signs of disappearing in our present, when it lends itself readily to the financialization of assets and liquidity of capital associated with neoliberalism. 3 Extractivism bears a more-than-incidental role in these processes, becoming what Imre Szeman has called 'the paradigmatic mode of contemporary capitalism, a generalisable principle or practice of twentieth-first century neoliberalism that is essential for us to grasp if we are to understand capital in this new century'. 4 The term in its current sense thus names a range of practices associated with the still-dominant logic of growth and acceleration that drives late (or neoliberal) capitalism, but beyond that, it names a habitus associated with life in modern and contemporary societies, in which our agency as subjects is thoroughly energy-

Muriel Rukeyser's 1936 documentary poem The Book of the Dead appropriates various forms of textual evidence to document a devastating mining disaster that occurred in 1930 in rural Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Written in the aftermath of the post-2008 financial crisis, Mark Nowak's 2009 text Coal Mountain Elementary revisits the same landscape Rukeyser had sought out seventy years earlier, and makes use of a similar technique as it combines reports of a 2006 mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia, with news reports from Chinese mining accidents and other materials. Both poems dramatise the distance separating extractivism-vulnerable landscapes of the periphery (rural, or in Nowak's case, global) from the accumulation of profits in the core. In reading these two texts side-by-side, it becomes clear that beyond their thematic similarities, the two poems also engage and adapt a methodology I call 'resource poetics', in which extractivist practices are exposed to view through poems' material incorporation of textual artefacts testifying to their ruinous effects. As such, the two poems, situated roughly seventy-five years apart, offer trenchant critiques of modernity in its extractivist mode.

This essay discusses Cathy Park Hong’s book-length poem Dance Dance Revolution (2007) in the context of the transnational turn in American studies. The essay discusses the ways in which the text thematizes history and language in its representation of contemporary global issues and argues that Dance Dance Revolution provides an important context for discussing issues and conflicts arising between the contemporary West and its discontents, and for interrogating modes of global cultural and linguistic fluidity. It then draws on the author’s experience of teaching the text in an advanced undergraduate course at a Finnish university as it examines the applicability of a transnational approach to teaching US literature and cultural studies in a contemporary European context.

This essay examines the cultural prominence of documentary photography during the 1930s, and reads Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” as in part an index to the critical tension between written word and photographic image theorized by Rukeyser and others during the period. “The Book of the Dead,” a work in which photography and photographers figure prominently, takes a self-critical approach to the documentary practices informing it, challenging the hegemony of the photographic image and the cultural conditions under which it assumed its rhetorical potency.

Jean Toomer's seldom-discussed long poem "The Blue Meridian," which he drafted over a long period beginning in the early 1920s, proposes an amalgamation of race and national belonging in the new type of the "American." Seeing himself as a precursor to this new hybrid, Toomer often polemicized against the limiting logic of race. In proposing such an understanding of race in relation to nation, Toomer drew on the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Melville J. Herskovits.In a 1934 essay he provisionally titled "On Being an American," Jean Toomer outlines his "vision of America"-that is, of the emergence of a newly hybridized racial type of which he saw himself as indicative ("Cane Years" 121). Toomer drafted the essay to clarify his own racial identity for a public that, he felt, routinely misrecognized him as an African American as it succumbed to the entrenched Manichean logic of black and white. Having witnessed the "divisions, separatisms and antagonisms" punctuating the American scene, Toomer could report that his countrypeople "were conscious of being anything but Americans" (121; italics in the original). In addressing what he saw as a deficiency in national sentiment, Toomer proposes to resolve the divisions he witnesses by recasting national belonging in utopian terms, imagining a dissolution of class, regional, ethnic, and-above all-racial antagonisms in positing a newly hybridized racial identity, the American-with himself as its prototype.Toomer's oft-made claim to being "the first American," a representative of a newly emerging racial group, was first articulated in a poem of that title that he initially drafted around 1922, which later became the long poem "The Blue Meridian." His claim rested on his own mixed ancestry, the "seven blood mixtures" he referred to in a letter written around the same time to the editors of the Liberator: "French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian" ("To the Editors" 155). Nearly ten years later, in a short note written just before his 1931 marriage to Margery Latimer, an event that created a national sensation for its brazen violation of the miscegenation taboo, Toomer was even more emphatic:There is a new race in America. I am a member of this new race. It is neither white nor black nor in-between. It is the American race, differing as much from white and black as white and black differ from each other. It is possible that there