Combustion Being: Fugitive Messages in "The Greenhouse Effect"

“But we don’t need to know Shell’s origins to know that climate catastrophe cannot be understood separate from the histories—and afterlives—of colonialism, slavery, and empire.”

In 1988, the oil corporation known as Shell published “The Greenhouse Effect,” a commissioned yet confidential report about global warming. The 87-page report is based on earlier studies by the corporation about its own role in the emission of greenhouse gases. Shell withheld the report from public disclosure until it was leaked over three decades later and, like other big oil companies, has continued to fuel the now worsened climate catastrophe.

What I find noteworthy about “The Greenhouse Effect” is not that Shell knowingly perpetuated global warming but that the report exists as a form of knowledge production once central to colonial statecraft. As Ann Laura Stoler explains, confidential and commissioned reports are among the documents that make up colonial archives—the “supreme technology” of rule for late nineteenth-century colonial states (Stoler 2002, 97).

Indeed, Shell is a merger between two companies founded in the late nineteenth-century: the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (1890) of the Netherlands and the “Shell” Transport and Trading Company (1897) of the United Kingdom. But we don’t need to know Shell’s origins to know that climate catastrophe cannot be understood separate from the histories—and afterlives—of colonialism, slavery, and empire. According to Denise Ferreira da Silva, the violent effects of global warming are both a result and a timeless recurrence of the ongoing past that only decolonization can truly interrupt.[1]   

In 1988, Shell assumed that confidentiality could control the truth about climate catastrophe and thus erase the deathly repetitions that rupture our present. What if erasure, as a poetic practice, could de-form the report to reveal another narrative from that which is concealed within it? Christina Sharpe argues that redaction (and annotation) is a way of “seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame” (Sharpe 2016, 117). I imagine this excess as the “undercommons” of language in language—where a fugitive meaning or message flitting between words reordered, blackened, and broken apart might bring a fugitive politics to the fore (Harney and Moten 2013).

What follows is an erasure poem that narrates a different “summary” of “The Greenhouse Effect” and, with Shell’s own words, highlights the white settler logic underlying global warming. Following Ferreira da Silva and many, many others, I suggest that survival depends in part on rejecting hegemonic conceptions of being imposed by Eurocentric epistemes such as Western science and it’s counterpart Enlightenment humanism.

[1] See, for example, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s 2022 talk “Negative Accumulation: The Racial Event or That Which Happens Without Time,” which can be found on the YouTube channel of the Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna.

About the Author

Tala Khanmalek is a writer, scholar, and educator. She is currently an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at California State University Fullerton and a (virtual) visiting scholar at Duke University. Tala earned a PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and was previously a postdoctoral associate at Princeton University. Her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, Barzakh, BAHR, Indiana Review, Zoeglossia’s Poem-of-the-Week, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and It’s Lit with PhDJ podcast. Her scholarly work has been published in Frontiers, Feminist Studies, and Latino Studies, among other journals.