Carbon Fibers: Coal and the Materiality of the Transnational

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as coal was increasingly being used for locomotion, this fossil fuel started moving itself, and to the most unexpected places. Due to several of its material features, like energetic potency, combustibility, smokeless‐ness, and the proximity of English coalfields to waterways, British coal was rapidly globalized via a new network of routes, depots, artificial canals, machines, standards and metrics, as well as political, social, and theological arrangements that (re)connected the imperial metropole to its peripheries. The character and trajectories of this infrastructure were themselves informed by the features of coal. For example, the proliferation of carbon fuel facilitated the gradual shift away from the long sea voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to the “Overland Route to India via Egypt”. An uneven voyage that previously could last an entire year now took exactly a month. The very geographic “middle‐ness” of the Middle East is a legacy of these rearrangements. Arguably, also our current vision of the “transnational” as a two dimensional cartographic space is one of coal’s lasting carbon footprints. Yet beyond a generic “time\space compression” and temporal and spatial homogenization, the above infrastructure introduced unforeseen wrinkles into a transnational sphere seen as merely the sum of its parts. By connecting remote places and by setting common standards, steamships, railways, and other coal-°©‐burning technologies also introduced comparability and thus heterogeneity into this system. Trains in colonial Egypt, for instance, ran at once incredibly fast (compared to the modes of transport they replaced) and frustratingly slow (compared to European trains). In turn, this nexus of time\space compression and comparison animated new kinds of anti-°©‐colonial politics and new styles of togetherness. The presentation will address some of the multiple connections between matter, abstraction, and politics, and their various inflections across “transnational” space.