ABSTRACT
This essay examines the ideas of carnival and the carnivalesque in relation to a modern social formation, which, cued by the name of its central figure, is referred to in this article as the Kingdom of Coal. Conjured incessantly from disjunct social perspectives on fossil fuel extraction and energy production, the Kingdom of Coal offers a grounded example of what Charles Taylor terms the ‘modern social imaginary’. Carnivalesque maskings and unmaskings dramatize a struggle for publicly relevant subjectivity in the United States. Social bodies constructed through such carnivalesque tropes as the grotesque body, the slaying of the king, and (ecologically) gay materiality articulate profoundly different stakes across class lines. Emulating the public space needed for critical reflection on such imaginaries, this essay experimentally brings into dialogue voices kept rigidly separated in channels of environmental decision-making and the national media. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of monologic and dialogic modes of communication, and the related concepts of classical and grotesque bodies and ecologies, drawn from his theorizing of carnival, are key.
