Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling by Jamie L. Jones (review)

Reviewed by:

• Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling by Jamie L. Jones
• Amy Kohout (bio)

Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling
By Jamie L. Jones. Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 244.

It might be because my family has been watching The Crown, but as soon as I read that George H. Newton and Fred J. Engel-hardt orchestrated the tour of a dead whale around the U.S. Midwest in the early 1880s—and that it became known as the “Prince of Whales”—Jamie L. Jones had sold me on Rendered Obsolete. While this whale is the subject of just one chapter, the Prince of Whales operates as a compelling example of the way Jones thinks about the relationship between whaling and what she calls “fossil modernity” (p. xi).

Rendered Obsolete is an interdisciplinary environmental humanities project that engages energy studies, infrastructure studies, media studies, and oceanic studies to model what Jones calls “energy archaeology,” or “a way of telling the history of energy from the point of view of the present in order to locate the traces of old energy resources, technologies, and cultures in [End Page 1057] contemporary and emerging energy cultures” (p. 14). This move destabilizes the boundaries between different kinds of energy regimes and helps readers see how “whaling culture scaffolded fossil fuel culture” (p. 7), resulting in a rich cultural history of an earlier energy transition. Each chapter centers different sites of cultural production: Moby-Dick and the Rockwell Kent illustrations accompanying a 1930 edition are the subjects of chapters 1 and 5; the rise of “quaintness tourism” and meaning-making on Nantucket in chapter 2 and the whitewashing of whaling history (specifically whalers), using what Jones calls “extractivist nostalgia” (p. 119), in chapter 4 situate shifts in whaling culture in place; and the paired inland stories of the Prince of Whales and the Progress, a wooden whaling ship transported to the 1893 World’s Fair, are the focus of chapter 3. Combined, these chapters offer a nuanced, novel take on how whaling and whaling culture reflect “the flickering associations of modernity and obsolescence” (p. 113) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While readers familiar with the concepts Jones is engaging here will find much to think with, Rendered Obsolete also offers readers from a broad range of disciplines pathways into the book’s big ideas. I want to underscore the accessibility of the chapters centered on Melville; even those not well versed in literary studies might feel called to (re)visit the white whale as a result of Jones’s discussion of how “the novel offers a keen reflection on the future of energy economies after energy transition” (p. 53). This opens into a consideration of extinction and obsolescence in whaling communities like Nantucket; urban historians and scholars of work and leisure, as well as public historians interested in memory work, will be interested in Jones’s Nantucket chapters (chs. 2 and 4). Jones demonstrates the persistent linkages between material and cultural elements throughout the book, but one remarkable example is her reading of Rockwell Kent’s Moby-Dick illustrations—drawings made to look like woodblock prints, often featuring wood and woodworking, which lead Jones to characterize these “skeuomorphs” as evidence of Kent’s “nostalgia for unmechanized, physical labor” (p. 165) and to invite us to join her in linking whalers’ labor, artists’ renderings of that labor, and the energy regimes powering them. And of course, I could not get enough of the Prince of Whales; I found the way Jones used the concept of “remediation” (p. 98) to frame American encounters with a whale corpse that was constantly being managed and transformed to be especially compelling.

Rendered Obsolete concludes with Jones’s experience sailing on the Charles W. Morgan, a whaling ship that was restored for a special thirty-eighth voyage in 2014 before returning to the Mystic Seaport Museum. The Morgan is another example of whaling infrastructure reimagined for a new purpose—further evidence of how older energy regimes shape those that follow. Here we see the larger stakes of Jones’s book: “The history of whaling’s afterlife...