Events
STC Book Launch: Spirits of Extraction by Claire Blencowe
The Social Theory Centre will host the book launch for Claire Blencowe's Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race.
Derya Ozkul will chair, with Martin Savransky (University of Bath) and our own Goldie Osuri and Hannah Jones sharing reflections on the book. Please join us, all welcome!
Spirits of Extraction revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to 'civilise savages', were crucial to the movement's foundation in eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, the book theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.
Details of the book are here https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526176509/