Throughout his fiction and nonfiction, Ralph Ellison explores the coexisting potentials of electricity, playing rhetorically on its capacity to kill, to harm, or to heal. He frames this ambivalence as an opportunity for reflection and for action, urging his readers to realize that the potentials of technology reside in human decisions. This chapter claims that Ellison’s rich electrical imagery can expand understandings of his aesthetic engagement with the broader themes of technology and humanism. Drawing on his published and unpublished works—including an unpublished alternative to the hospital scene in Invisible Man—this chapter argues that Ellison’s narratives can shed light on persisting debates about the relationship between human life and technological systems.

Chapter 3 shifts from Britain and Switzerland to France, where electric demonstrations and experimental physics courses had become extremely popular in the 1780s. The artist Girodet referenced the visual and structural features of eighteenth-century electricity in both his written and his painted work. Specifically, he was drawn to its treatment of the human body, which was said to be a porous and penetrable entity capable of receiving and transmitting this powerful, immaterial force. Yet Girodet’s paintings featured dissolving bodies, strange atmospheric effects, and highly unorthodox forms of illumination that were incompatible with the empirical procedures that were central to the study of electricity. Reflecting on the revolutionary implications of a porous conception of selfhood, Girodet’s paintings thus interrogated the epistemological and political viability of an electrified body.

Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy in the world; it is expected at least to double by 2050. This chapter reviews how benefits from hydropower can be maximised while reducing environmental and social impacts. The scope for expansion of hydropower is considerable, but adverse environmental and social impacts need to be managed. Climate change is impacting hydro generation through changed snow melts and river flows, greater evaporation and more frequent extreme events, such as flooding and droughts. Hydropower infrastructure needs to have margins to cope with extreme events and adapt to changing conditions. Relicensing at specified intervals can provide a framework for renovation, removal or changes to minimise impacts and maximise benefits of dams. Planning of dams needs to be undertaken on a whole-of-river-basin scale . The World Commission on Dams (2000) recommended priorities for more sustainable development. The Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol is one codification of better hydropower development practices. Hydropower is important in providing storage and firming capacity to complement intermittent generation from solar and wind generators.

As unusually strong Santa Ana winds whipped through California in fall 2019, the state’s utilities faced a bind: cut power for millions, or risk their transmission infrastructure sparking another devastating and deadly fire? In the end, both occurred, and California was alternately ablaze and in the dark throughout the fall. This impossible predicament was, many said, a harbinger of things to come: climate change exposing the precarity of seemingly advanced economies, as centuries of fossil fuel emissions reveal their bite.

The chapter presents case studies from Mexico and Spain of policy interventions that regulate groundwater extraction and use. The cases involve pricing, quotas, and removal of subsidies aimed at reducing negative externalities associated with groundwater over-pumping. The examples demonstrate the use of different policy instruments and their effects on the behavior of groundwater users in addressing negative externalities. The example from Mexico shows how a subsidy of electricity for pumping groundwater leads to perverse effects resulting in depletion of the aquifer. The example from Spain shows the negative effects of unregulated groundwater extracted for irrigation purposes on groundwater-dependent wetlands that contribute to ecosystem services.

Chapters 4 and 5 quantify Southeast Asia’s wartime economic collapse. In every country except Thailand wartime output drops created probably modern economic history’s greatest macroeconomic collapse (chapter 4). Per capita GDP fell by at least a half in most countries and trade to a fraction of pre-war levels. Chapter 5 describes similar contractions in transport, public utilities and manufacturing. The chapters explore a macroeconomic crisis that brought shortages or the unavailability of new clothing, soap and many basic manufactures. Southeast Asians suffered hunger, famine and an extreme deprivation of material goods.

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.

This chapter looks at the global characteristics of renewable energy use, focusing on traditional renewable energy sources such as bioenergy, hydropower, and geothermal. For each technology option, the chapter outlines the fundamental technological aspects and the key global production and consumption trends. By doing so, the chapter also assesses the cost dimension of the various sources, by presenting the evolution of global levelized costs of electricity in the last decade.

This chapter first illustrates the fundamental characteristics of natural gas, including: (i) History of natural gas; (ii) Where natural gas resources are currently located across the globe, also with a focus on the difference between conventional and unconventional resources; (iii) Technological aspects of natural gas exploration, production, and transport; (iv) Global natural gas production, consumption, and trade trends. It then outlines the characteristics of natural gas markets in different regions of the world, and how they differ from oil markets. To conclude, the chapter discusses the geopolitical issues associated with access to natural gas.

This chapter looks at the major energy-related problems facing Africa, including costs, environmental pollution, social inequities, and infrastructure challenges. It provides an understanding of the major challenges of energy poverty, including: (i) The problem of lack of access to electricity, options to address this problem, strategies and policies to implement these options, and examples where the problem has been addressed; (ii) The problem of dependence on dirty cookstoves for major energy needs, options to address this problem, strategies and policies to implement these options, and examples where the problem has been addressed. The chapter also looks at the potential for African countries to leapfrog traditional energy sources and infrastructure to distributed renewable energy systems and innovative transportation systems.

An argument about the interpretation of black atlantic music is used here to articulate a joyful and shamelessly sentimental response to the dry defaults of ‘afropessimist’ thinking. An extended discussion of the relationship between music and freedom provides a means to explore the possibility of a dissident politics of culture articulated in terms derived from the vexed history of organised musical sound.

This chapter provides further context to the impact of project finance mechanisms by examining the Ugandan Bujagali Hydroelectric Power Project referred to in the Preface. This case study is different from the others. It focusses on the interface of contractual and policy instruments with indigenous peoples’ rights to land and then casts the net wider to examine how complex pricing terms and the inequitable negotiation of concessionary power purchase agreements (PPA), in which the government is the end buyer, will have implications for overall vulnerability; for example, by locking governments into an overall bad deal in which all the risk is passed onto the state which has little control over spiralling electricity costs. Thinking about these debt contract–community linkages and what might be done within the context of an important negotiated contract such as the PPA is crucial for two reasons: that of the spread of supposedly cleaner and greener hydroelectric projects worldwide to meet energy demand and the growth of the ‘people first’ trend in public-private partnerships in the quest to mobilise the private sector towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

This chapter argues that the increasingly close relationship identified by historians between electricity and the body continued into the twentieth century. The development of neurology as a medical specialty in the latter part of the nineteenth century further enhanced the perception of the body as an electrical machine. As the electrical wiring of the nervous system became viewed as the prime seat of bodily control and sensation, so electricity itself was implicated in the ageing process. Medical scientists and entrepreneurs came into conflict over who was entitled to use electrotherapy as a form of treatment, and numerous devices, including electric belts, UV lamps and products based around radium, flooded the market. In contrast to a hormone-based understanding of the body, which emphasised hormonal differences as indicative of males and females, electrical explanations of matter and the body led to a more universal view of life; the same balance of electrical forces was required to preserve youth and vitality in both sexes.

Dickinson wants to affect her readers, but not to overwhelm them. Is language’s power literal, its causation direct? Even if it might be, language’s material, sensational aspects must be converted to meanings. The question for Dickinson is to what extent that conversion is automatic, irresistible. Dickinson uses the frameworks of Common Sense and Humean philosophies to think about the nature of power in causation. The more naïve or Common Sense realist version of “electric sympathy” literalizes words’ causative power, while Dickinson’s associationist rhetoric of sympathy observes a skeptical gap between persons. Campbell’s Humean rhetoric insists that cause is attributive and interpretive. Bain’s neuroscience suggests that electricity is integral, not inimical, to the perceptual process. Consistently, Dickinson employs a figurative, ambiguous style which maps onto the recipient’s processes of inference down to the neurological, that is, electrical, level, inducing a lightning in the mind which is the reader’s own power.