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This short essay is part of an Interrogations book forum on Claire Blencowe's Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester University Press, 2025)
Like many scholars, I regularly receive requests from publishers to review book manuscripts on areas they think I know something about, or assume I might have some interest in. Alas, their assumptions are only rarely confirmed. But I knew, as soon as I received the email from Manchester University Press a few years ago with the subject line “Spirits of Extraction”, that this was bound to be one of those rare occasions.
Reading through the body of the email, I quickly discovered why. The name "Claire Blencowe" appeared, and suddenly everything made sense. So I happily agreed, read it carefully while hiding from a scorching heatwave in the air-conditioned bar of a central London hotel, and found myself engrossed by its originality, by its sense of necessity, by the depth and breadth of a proposition for a planetary cultural studies at the intersection of capitalism, religion, extraction, and the metaphysics of race. Such a proposition had been intimated only in very faint outline elsewhere, and it cried out for precisely the sort of thoughtful, expansive, and scholarly treatment Claire was in the process of giving it. For a change, my response upon delving into the manuscript was not a bemused “why?”… It was —if you'll excuse the blasphemous turn of phrase— “thank God.”
Written through and in the wake of the pandemic and the insurgent Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd's murder, Blencowe’s book seems to me a uniquely calibrated intervention into the planetary mess that is the present tense. One subtended in the enduring if permanently unstable condition of struggling unevenly to catch an always improper breath on an earth that has not been made for us (whoever we happen to be), in a world that cares not whether most live or die. A condition in which, to borrow Nathaniel Mackey’s (2018) words from his inaugural Robert Creely Lecture “Breath and Precarity,” the fact that “none of us is guaranteed our next breath is a truth that has to sit alongside another, equally obvious, which is that precarity has been and continues to be unequally distributed, some groups serving, for others, as a sacrifice to it or a shield against it.”
Mackey (2018) is right, of course, that a “poetics of breath belabours the obvious: without breath we lose vitality, without breath we die.” And he also has his finger on the pulse when he simultaneously affirms that such a poetics becomes all the more evident through the “radical pneumaticism in which the involuntary is rendered deliberate, laboured, in which breath is belabored, made strange” as it becomes “tactical, tactile, textile, even textual, a haptic recension whose jagged disbursements augur duress.” This is why I resist the temptation to call the planetary poetics of breath that Spirits of Extraction (2025) activates “a breath of fresh air.” For in her careful genealogy of the tangles that bind the history of Methodism with settler colonialism and the global architecture of extraction, her book reminds us —quietly but insistently, almost apophatically, as if murmured under her breath— that there is something dangerous in every breath. That, even amongst Christians, religion —if we must continue using the term— has never been only or mostly about holy texts and their various interpretations, let alone about whether and how the faithful come to sustain what modernity reduces to a question of “belief.” Teaching us how to understand the emergence of Methodist revival as the very spiritual expression of the earth's own fracturing and desedimentation, Blencowe’s lucid book reminds us that holy texts have never been —can never be— disentangled from their surrounding worlds or from an entire material and historical array of world-altering and earth-churning practices we might well and truly call “spiritual.” For "Spirit," the very word and concern of so much of Blencowe’s book, itself comes from pneuma — which is to say from breath, life, wind, and air.
In a sense, then, Spirits of Extraction is more than an alluring title. It is an inspired intervention that simultaneously names and connects the geohistorical condition that led to its writing at one peak of suffocation, and the spiritual and necropolitical project of uneven planetary precarity the book sets out to unearth. If, as Blencowe (2025) argues, the emergence of Methodism can be understood as a spiritual strategy for surviving the terror of geological instability and bodily precarity built into life at the industrialised mine, then “to become immersed in spirit, process, and transformation” was what enabled revival Methodists to step into what she calls the evangelical abyss — “to sing on gallows, to find peace in the face of the great expiration, to be ‘happy oh so happy’” as the extractive industry wrecked the earth, bodies, and souls around it, and empire expanded its operations and appropriation of rock, body, and soul across the world.
In this way, the Spirit that Methodism both embraced and expressed with bated breath sacralised resource extraction as a form of redemption, such that the practice of mining and its extractive asphyxiations of both bodies and atmospheres became themselves sources of civilisation and Christian salvation. First with the Cornish miners themselves, racialised in their very precarisation. And then in the colonies, where Methodist missions contributed to the inscription of settler colonial sovereignty — in the abuse and subjugation of the Ojibwa, Claire's book shows us how Methodism turned mining not only into an articulation of what Kathryn Yusoff (2018) calls the geology of race, but into a transcendent movement of spiritual education. The so-called savage had to go in order to be “led out” (educare), had to dig and grove the earth so as to participate in the progressive work of the Spirit by rescuing the gift and power of fossilised matter from demonic depths, bringing it to the surface — and in so doing, being born again. Through this incredibly insightful interpretation, Claire shows us that the geo-theological assemblage to which Methodism gave way was also the assembling of a form of desire that eighteenth-century Modernity came to call "civilisation" — the redemptive ordeal of a certain kind of power given in what she calls "the desire for the movement from the depths to the surface; the blinding entry into light that can be experienced only by spending time in the pitch black; the experience of rebirth that becomes possible only in abyssal proximity to death."
Breathing, Jean-Thomas Tremblay (2022) suggests, “is inevitably morbid.” Which is to say that the modern geology of race and civilisation whose contours Blencowe sets out to trace tells us not only that “we once were blind but now can see,” but that the blind must be choked —so often to death— before they can learn to breathe. And yet in its original explorations of geology, extraction, racialisation, and theology, Spirits of Extraction teaches us something else: that to take spirit seriously —which is to say to be given over to the radical pneumaticism of a poetics of breath under duress— is at the same time to open the possibility of imagining a planetary conspiracy, a multitude of speechlessly breathing bodies gathered together in shared respiration across difference, turning their uneven precarity and complicity not into “incapacitating guilt, or desire for redemption, but into a spirit of refusal that recognises that if our suffocation and degradation are shared, so too is our liberation.”
Indeed, as I returned from my reading and breathed in the stifling air, I wrote back to the publisher to that this book was absolutely necessary, and should be published as soon as possible. And now that it is out, it’s also become something else: a genuine inspiration for those of us pondering how to engender forms of collective respiration — political, spiritual, planetary — beyond the logics of redemption, salvation, and damnation, in the enduring violence and dislocations that make live-in under duress on an earth at loose ends with itself.
References
Blencowe, Claire. Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025)
Mackey, Nathaniel. “Breath and Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics,” in Poetics and Precarity, ed. M. M. Kim and C. Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).
Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. Breathing Aesthetics (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022).
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
How to cite this article: Savransky, Martin (2026), "A Planetary Poetics of Breath," Interrogations, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18714210
