Fossils of Tomorrow: The Literature and Culture of the Great Acceleration is a book length project that traces out the roles and powers of modern aesthetics at the dawn of the Great Acceleration. Ranging over documentary film, global anglophone literature, conservation literature, museum exhibitions, visual art, and postwar legal debates over land and resources in the decolonizing world, this book offers another way to see midcentury culture, one that moves beyond the strict geopolitical polarities of the Cold War and the old, but still powerful narratives of modernist cultural decline. By sorting out the dialectical interplay of aesthetics and the postwar scramble for natural resources, we not only witness a sea change in the shape and function of modern art; we begin to understand how our perceptions of world-ecology and the world-system were shaped and why reading these artifacts of the recent past might make the present legible and the future livable.
