Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Arresting Ecologies argues that writers and artists from around the world drew inspiration from experiences of stalled and impeded mobility across air, land, and sea, and used them to critique the accelerative impulses of the Anthropocene. The monograph unearths an alternative literary history of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone novel by challenging the governing idea that literature and art reflect and celebrate mobility in their formal composition. It examines how a multi-genre archive from the interwar era to the present from Britain, Europe, Trinidad, and East Africa responds to shifts in energy and telecommunication regimes. These literary and visual works are set on merchant ships confronting coal shortages and slumping international trade; at contested sites of oil and asphalt extraction and refinement; on islands conscripted into Cold War battles from the skies and airwaves; in a pirate state; and at a vast desert harnessed for wind power by neocolonial governments. What connects them is a persisting sense of uncertainty during transitional moments in which seas, land, air, and skies were recodified by states and private entities under the banner of development. The anti-developmental formal and generic logic of each work encodes skepticism toward promises of social progress, environmental sustainability, and global connection.</jats:p>