Description
Book SynopsisOil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities. Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states. The chapters engage with African, South American, South Asian, Iranian, and transnational petrofictions and cover topics such as the relationship of colonialism to the fossil fuel economy, issues of gender in the Thermocene epoch, and discussions of migration, precarious labor, and the petro-diaspora. This unique exploration includes testimonies of the oil encounterthrough memoirs, journals, and interviewsfrom a diverse geo
Trade Review“This excellent collection not only provides an authoritative introduction to petrofiction’s key texts, conceptual debates, and critical methodologies but also extends the range and scope of that work. In their impressive expansion of the geographical ambit and theoretical concerns of oil fiction, particularly into the Global South, these essays offer new and hitherto underrealized perspectives. They are what the field has been waiting for.”
—Graeme Macdonald,coauthor of Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World-Literature
“Oil Fictions covers considerable ground in analyzing oil fiction as well as identifying new sensibilities associated with oil’s fantasy of progress and well-being.”
—Sofia Ahlberg ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reading Our Contemporary Petrosphere
Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi
1. Petrofiction, Revisited
Amitav Ghosh
2. Energy and Autonomy: Worker Struggles and the Evolution of Energy Systems
Ashley Dawson
3. Gendering Petrofiction: Energy, Imperialism, and Social Reproduction
Sharae Deckard
4. Petrofeminism: Love in the Age of Oil
Helen Kapstein
5. “We Are Pipeline People”: Nnedi Okorafor’s Ecocritical Speculations
Wendy W. Walters
6. Petro-drama in the Niger Delta: Ben Binebai’s My Life in the Burning Creeks and Oil’s “Refuse of History”
Henry Obi Ajumeze
7. Documenting “Cheap Nature” in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace: A Petro-aesthetic Critique
Stacey Balkan
8. Aestheticizing Absurd Extraction: Petro-capitalism in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “In Mussafah Grew People”
Swaralipi Nandi
9. Petro-cosmopolitics: Oil and the Indian Ocean in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
Micheal Angelo Rumore
10. Xerodrome Lube: Cyclonic Geopoetics and Petropolytical War Machines
Simon Ryle
11. Oil Gets Everywhere: Critical Representations of the Petroleum Industry in Spanish American Literature
Scott DeVries
12. Conjectures on World Energy Literature
Imre Szeman
13. Petrofiction as Stasis in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
Corbin Hiday
Memoirs and Interviews
14. Assessing the Veracity of the Gulf Dreams: An Interview with Author Benyamin
Maya Vinai
15. Testimonies from the Permian Basin
Kristen Figgins, Rebecca Babcock, and Sheena Stief
Afterword
Contributors
Index
