introduction
On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to
Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else
Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman,
and Adam Carlson
Oil transformed everyday life in the twentieth century. In the twentyfirst century, we are finally beginning to realize the degree to which
oil has made us moderns who and what we are, shaping our existence close at hand while narrating us into networks of power and
commerce far, far away. At the heart of this newfound awareness
of oil’s importance to our sensibilities and social expectations – our
belief, for example, that sociality is of necessity narrated by perpetual growth, ceaseless mobility, and the expanded personal capacities and possibilities associated with the past century’s new flood of
energy into our lives – is our recognition that over the course of our
current century we will need to extract ourselves from our dependence on oil and make the transition to new energy sources and new
ways of living. In June 2015, the g7 nations pronounced that the era
of fossil fuels would end by 2100. With this declaration (and many
more ambitious ones like it),1 we have embarked upon a social transformation without historical precedent, especially given the scope
(the earth’s population may reach 9.6 billion people by midcentury)
and scale (affecting the infrastructure of the entire planet) involved.
Oil transformed life over the century in which we came to depend on
it; the looming threat of its absence from our lives means that it will
transform us again, from people who are at home and comfortable
in the petrocultures we have devised for ourselves to people who will
have to shape ourselves to fit contexts and landscapes we can barely
imagine, even if we need to do so – and quickly.
To help begin this work of energy transition and transformation,
researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have turned
4
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
their critical attention toward oil and energy as never before. What
distinguishes the scholarly discussions that make up the emerging
field of the “energy humanities,” to which the essays in this collection are a contribution, is that they position oil and energy as the
fulcrum around which many of today’s most pressing social, economic, and political issues must be analyzed and understood.2 The
energy transition that will need to take place over the twenty-first
century is certainly filled with all manner of technological and political challenges. However, the most significant challenges involved in
moving away from fossil fuels to new forms of energy are less matters of technology or public policy than they are social and cultural
problems. At issue is not only the kinds of energy we use and depend
on – that is, whether we should replace fossil fuels with solar or
wind power – but also the purposes to which we put energy, the why
and how of energy. These purposes are varied and extensive, and
are folded into every aspect of our lives, linking our deepest hopes
and desires to the spaces of energy extraction and to the measure
of watts used per person per year. Energy transition will therefore
involve not only a change in the kinds of energy we use, but also a
transition in the values and practices that have been shaped around
our use of the vast amounts of energy provided by fossil fuels.
The lack, to date, of critical intellectual resources by which we
might make possible the social transition needed to support and
enable energy transition is one of the reasons why ever-increasing
public knowledge about global warming has resulted in relatively
minimal action to address it. The challenges we face are significant.
As Vaclav Smil points out, “lessons of the past energy transitions
may not be particularly useful for appraising and handicapping the
coming energy transition, because it will be exceedingly difficult to
restructure the modern high-energy industrial and post-industrial
civilization on the basis of non-fossil – that is, overwhelmingly
renewable – fuels and flows.”3 The essays collected in Petrocultures
provide a map of the social and political challenges of the energy
transition we face now, laying bare the complex and contradictory
ways oil has shaped our social imaginaries and offering a multifaceted analysis of the claims and assumptions that shape and guide
how we think and talk about fossil fuels.
Energy has played an essential role in shaping modern social and
cultural life. As many social and cultural critics are now becoming
Introduction: On Petrocultures
5
aware, “the story of human development has been the story of the
increased use of energy. Indeed, we can even think of human history as falling into epochs marked by the human ability to exploit
various sources of energy.”4 The modern discovery of oil in 1859
in Titusville, Pennsylvania, played a crucial role in enabling the
monumental growth of human populations and of the technological
innovation that we now associate with the development of modernity. The sixteenfold increase in economic output over the course of
the twentieth century required a seventeenfold increase in energy
consumption;5 similar increases in water use, sulphur dioxide emissions, world population levels, and (of course) carbon dioxide
emissions are directly related to the expanded economic capacities
enabled by fossil fuels.6 While it would be reductive to see in the
expanded use of energy an explanation for every aspect of modernity, it is equally problematic not to include energy in our narratives
of historical change and development, including social and cultural
shifts and transitions. Despite evidence of the importance of energy
to the shape of our lives – and of the specific importance of fossil
fuels, which have fuelled not just automobiles and the culture of
mass individual mobility, but also a consumer era shaped around
polymers and plastics (as Kirsty Robertson, Amanda Boetzkes, and
Janine MacLeod point out in their contributions to this volume) –
we moderns have been almost wilfully blind to its impact on us.
Figuring energy in relation to historical developments opens up new
insights into the forces of power and politics that have shaped modernity, and demands that we critically explore the surprising limits of aesthetics and representation in relation to energy – an issue
addressed by almost every essay in this book.
The twentieth century was transformed by oil. Why, then, has it
taken until the twenty-first century for us to begin to grapple with
the cultural and social consequences of this transformation and with
the substance that made it happen? The importance of fossil fuels in
defining modernity has stood in inverse relationship to their presence in our cultural and social imaginaries, a fact that comes as a
surprise to almost everyone who engages in critical explorations of
energy today. In order to understand how fossil fuels have managed
to be hidden in plain sight – an obviously important resource but
one whose importance has not been determinately and precisely figured in culture – a great deal of work on petrocultures has examined
6
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
the relationship between fossil fuels and literary representation. An
early work in the energy humanities is Amitav Ghosh’s essay “Petrofiction.”7 Ghosh poses a simple question. Given the geopolitics of the
twentieth century, which has been shaped to an inordinate degree
around struggles over oil and gas, why have fossil fuels been thematized in so few of the fictions of the petro-hegemon of the century,
the United States? This absence of energy from much of twentiethcentury narrative has prompted critics to re-examine literary history,
not only to hunt for those few examples of oil fiction that do exist,
but also to interrogate the broader relationship between energy,
representation, and culture. Glenn Willmott’s and Joshua Schuster’s
explorations of oil in American and modernist literature offer new
perspectives on these literary fields. Given the absence of oil from
our narratives, these authors also raise questions about the politics
of literary representation and our capacity to fully name the forms
and forces of modern culture and experience.
Similar investigations into the significance of fossil fuel representation have been undertaken in relation to the visual arts, film, and
photography. The absence noted by Ghosh of fossil fuels in twentieth-century literature (and even earlier by Bertolt Brecht, who noted
that “petroleum resists the five-act form”8) extends to these other
areas of culture as well, and the growing critical interest in naming
and explaining this absence is reflected in the number of pieces in
this volume that situate themselves at the conjunction of energy, aesthetics, and representation. Georgiana Banita and Amanda Boetzkes
offer analyses of the aesthetics of petrocultures, probing the way
that oil culture shapes and conditions vision. One example of the
complex manner in which oil shapes visuality – and how, in turn,
modern visuality has been shaped to make it difficult to see oil – is
offered in Michael Malouf’s investigation of the way our deadened
relationship to the social consequences of energy is naturalized in
popular children’s films, the resource’s invisibility reaffirmed even
in those films that thematize the need for us to transition to new
forms of energy. The possibility of a critical petro-aesthetic – and
the challenges of making visible this socially invisible substance – is
further explored in Clint Burnham’s analysis of Edward Burtynsky’s
widely known photo-narrative Oil. This volume is additionally distinguished by the contributions of Brenda Longfellow, Allison Rowe,
and Geo Takach – artists who recognize the challenges that oil has
Introduction: On Petrocultures
7
posed to representation and who work to develop a critico-aesthetic
vocabulary so that we might all the more forcefully make oil a part
of representation – a crucial step in figuring the true cultural, social,
and political significance of energy.
Critical engagement with the history and politics of oil is also
integral to a fuller understanding of the petrocultures we inhabit.
That energy (and fossil fuels in particular) shaped and defined twentieth-century politics is undeniable. The geopolitics of the modern
era – everything from colonial expansion, which was underwritten
by the energy from coal in the UK, to the ongoing misadventures
of the West in the Middle East, to the just-in-time production and
container shipping networks of globalization – is tied to availability
of and access to fossil fuels. But the impact of fossil fuels on politics
goes deeper than this, extending to the very core of our political
experience and shaping even our political philosophy, whether we
have realized it or not. “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on
an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. Most of our freedoms are
energy intensive,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty.9 The verities and pieties of liberal political philosophy were imagined against the backdrop of a world with ever-expanding energy resources. In a world
in which energy will no longer be so abundant, we now have to
revisit and reimagine our energy intensive freedoms.10 In Carbon
Democracy, Timothy Mitchell argues that carbon-based energy (first
coal and then oil) has played an important role in shaping our contemporary conceptions of democracy – something the West insistently deploys as a rhetorical strategy in justifying expansion projects
into oil-rich nations in the Middle East (we bring democracy as we
extract oil). Mitchell’s research shows the formative role of energy
in the political project of democracy and, by extension, the constitution of the modern nation-state and the neoliberal state of the
twenty-first century.
Many of the contributions to this volume highlight the political significance of energy resources; they do so not by noting the
(undeniable) geopolitical importance of energy, but by alerting us to
the deeper political operations of oil and energy. If oil has been hidden in plain sight in cultural representation, this is equally true of its
social and political presence. Pipelines serve an important material
function in getting energy from extraction sites in the hinterland
to the postmodern spaces in which oil and gas are consumed. As
8
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
Graeme Macdonald and Darin Barney explain, pipelines also play
an important role in making oil invisible, naturalizing its presence
in our lives and hiding the environmental impacts of extraction
far from the eyes of concerned publics. Barney’s essay treats pipelines as an important media form that has played (and continues to
play) a key role in the constitution of the Canadian nation-state. As
Sourayan Mookerjea shows in his contribution, the redefinition of
Canadian nationalism in relation to the country’s status as a petrostate (especially during the decade-long reign of Prime Minister Stephen Harper) has had implications for the country’s narrative of
multiculturalism and its relations with First Nations communities.
These subtle re-narrations and re-imaginings of politics as a result
of energy have taken place in other oil-producing nations as well,
as David McDermott Hughes shows in his investigations of “petropastoralism” in Trinidad. Hughes offers an account of the political
processes by which broad local support for petro-projects is secured,
even given the community worries about the environmental implications of living near extraction sites. Michael Truscello argues that
we need to see nation-states as complex petro-modern assemblages
whose action and activities include by-products – like the poisons in
water systems mapped in Janine MacLeod’s essay – that will outlive
contemporary political arrangements by hundreds of years. These
essays point to political contexts and circumstances produced by oil
and fossil fuels, and the range of new political questions that arise
from a critical focus on energy.
Just as politics has been shaped by and in reaction to oil, so,
too, have many of our most important concepts and theories. Once
again, as with the link between politics and energy, the shaping influence of fossil fuels on philosophy and critical theory has had an
impact on how we view the present and our collective ability to
respond to the problems and provocations of a fossil fuel society.
Andrew Pendakis explores oil as the hidden Real of metaphysics
and matter in the modern era – the ur-commodity that constitutes
a key component of ontological essence and which is also a prime
source of value. Tim Kaposy argues that oil necessitates new forms
and modes of historiography in order to capture the substance’s
power and impact, especially if we are to ever organize ourselves in
relation to energy alternatives. Randy Schroeder’s engagement with
Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak – one of the only extended encounters
Introduction: On Petrocultures
9
between philosophy and oil – is intended to unsettle the assumptions
informing the concept of “sustainability,” arguing that the rational
instrumental philosophy that shapes sustainability is the self-same
one that produced our environmental and energy crisis. In his contribution, Mark Simpson critiques the ideology of “lubricity” – the
contemporary fantasy world we inhabit, one of smooth flows of
people, resources, and capital that demands intensified use of petrocarbons to keep everything moving.
These essays track dangerous logics and concepts – ideas that are
threatening either because of their (hitherto unexplained) link to fossil fuel energy or because they impede our capacity to fully address
environmental problems. The logics that shape our present have
been passed down to us, some dating back millennia and grounded
in religions and cultural beliefs about what it means to be human
and to live in society, others a product of Western Enlightenment
modes of relating to the world – of Keynesian models of growth
and progress, Cartesian dualism resulting in racial and gender subjugation, the ideologies governing conquest and colonialism – that
now undergird the nation-state system and global business alliances
alike.11 Now, suddenly, within a generation or two, we need to confront from within our current conundrum, and without the luxury
of objectivity or distance, how to reinvent and reimagine our lives
and the concepts and philosophies that have long shaped them.
Oil has transformed life, and in a deeper and more profound way
than one might first imagine. The contributions to Petrocultures
highlight this in multiple ways, drawing attention to energy’s shaping
influence, at once cultural, social, and political. We recognize that it
can seem like an overstatement to claim that energy and fossil fuels
in particular have had such a determinate historical influence, especially given energy’s long absence from critical consideration. The
question might be posed: If energy was so important, why hadn’t we
noticed before now? And yet, its importance to shaping our lives is
significant, reaching across the register of our experiences and moving from the concrete and material to the abstract and immaterial.
To take just one example: to be modern is to be mobile as never
before. At the heart of this mobility is the culture of the automobile.
In the West, the automobile has been imbricated as a normal and
necessary tool for personal independence and the successful management of a nuclear family, which in and of itself is intrinsic to the
10
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
neoliberal construction of personal success. The promotion of the
nuclear family as the accepted social norm has had significant ramifications for women and men, who must independently reproduce in
each household tasks that, had they been socioculturally constructed
otherwise, could have easily been industrialized, thereby relieving
many women and families of a significant amount of domestic
labour.12 The housing needs of the nuclear family home have shaped
the design of urban and suburban living in petrocultures, just as the
number of consumer goods and services necessary to run a single
residence has created a large capitalist marketplace. These socially
constructed relationships to consumer products – whether it is the
automobile, or even women’s fashion and cosmetic products, including silicone breast implants – have been naturalized to such a degree
that they are being upheld in twenty-first-century advertising campaigns as symbols of Western women’s equality and freedom. By
proxy, non-Western women’s inability to access these products is
upheld as evidence of women’s oppression.
Advertising images as well as cinematic and cultural narratives
represent the largely uncritical socio-cultural acceptance of the automobile as a symbol of our own individual freedoms. These ideals
of liberty or emancipation have been constructed very differently
according to one’s subject position relative to cis-heteropatriarchal
normativity. Ultimately, however, mobility is part of the construction of a petro-capitalist economy in which the car and other petroleum-powered machines and petroleum-derived consumer products become inextricable from the modern imaginary. As Andrew
S. Gross argues, “the most common trope of driving – ‘the freedom
of the road’” popularized in the early twentieth century is linked to
market strategies that were targeting women as consumers. In fact,
he argues, “the woman driver quickly became the central figure of
consumerism. Gender, in fact, turns out to be an important strategy
for mediating some of the conflicts and anxieties attending the transition to a consumer-oriented economy.”13 Within this system, women
become both consumers of automobile culture as well as commodities within the same circular network.14 As Cecily Devereux discusses in her chapter, women and cars, in many instances, are made
synonymous with one another, the automobile being perceived as an
object of desire and either equated to or accessorized by a woman:
both objectified and both fetishized. Our relations and our gendered
Introduction: On Petrocultures
11
relationships to commodities and the identity tropes they embody
have been figured as the natural outcome of oil and progress, when
in fact they form a complex series of socio-cultural entanglements
in the West over the last two centuries, culminating in neoliberal
politics and economics. Freedom, identity, success: our deepest ideals
and most prominent social fantasies are mediated and enabled by the
energies of fossil fuels. Capitalist imperatives ensure that we measure
what we value; therefore, transformation will require a radical shift
in worldview and how we attribute meaning. Oil prices are indexed
daily. That which does not neatly fit into such indexes is rendered
valueless as an externality or even casualty to this structural violence: glaciers, clean water, clean air, environmental rights, Indigenous rights, Indigenous peoples, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (mmiw) in Canada. In her work, Audra Simpson makes
a strong critique of the genocidal project of extractivism, whereby
the handmaidens of white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal petrocapitalism deploy specific logics in the name of nation building and
economic growth that require the eradication of certain bodies, in
particular those of Indigenous women: the original owners of the
oil- and resource-rich lands now occupied by settler Canadians.15
The colonial project of the nation relies on the pillage of natural
resources and the construction of race, class, and gender, which reify
some people as resources to be exploited, resulting in socio-cultural
paradigms where some lives matter more than others. However, for
extraction to carry on, this reality must be denied, as former Prime
Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada did
for a decade (up until 2015), in order to push through environmentally damaging industrial projects and legislation.
As the field of energy humanities develops, it will need to pay
greater attention to the uneven impacts of fossil fuels on human
communities. Our oil-fuelled neoliberal economies and the vicious,
voracious practices of globalization have created conditions of
increasing disparity between rich and poor, and have feminized/
wife-ized (in other words, rendered precarious) whole new strata
of the global population over the last half century. Such reorganizations have increased the wealth of a few elites built on a foundation of short-term, part-time contracts with masses of overworked
debtors. All of this has been accomplished as markets drive personal aspirations toward increased consumption (on the one
12
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
hand) while reducing wages and salaries, proclaiming we must all
“do more with less” in the workplace and public sphere (on the
other). We must work harder and expect less in return, in terms of
social security and social services – the commons, and the common
good, constantly being eroded. This reality has reproduced itself
time and again, the planet over.16 Extractivist, capitalist production
has resulted in what is now being referred to as the Anthropocene:
human-induced climate change on such a scale and to such a degree
that it can now be mapped within geological time.17 Of course, this
geological term redistributes responsibility for the negative impacts
on our planetary ecosystem to all “humans,” when these outcomes
have largely been caused by populations in the global West, and by
those with the greatest access to power – fossil fuels and capital –
within those zones.18
To successfully undertake an energy transition in this century, it is
essential to unravel these logics and our attachments to them in order
to better understand the material and immaterial infrastructures and
superstructures that shape our daily lived realities and govern our
choices and mobilities within existing social, economic, and political
networks. Petrocultures is an attempt to name and explain some of
the key aspects of this monumental challenge – an early step in a
still-unfolding cultural, social, and political project.
This collection is composed of twenty-one chapters that touch on
oil issues in almost every corner of the globe: from the Arctic to
Scotland to Saudi Arabia; from Alberta’s oil sands and Ontario’s
manufacturing regions to the Gulf of Mexico; from Iraq and Kuwait
to China and India; and from Nigeria to Trinidad and Tobago. The
authors analyze a range of social and political discourses – sometimes
regional, sometimes national, and at other times planetary – that,
when taken together, illustrate the ways that oil has been valorized
and has thus transformed life as we know it. Many of the contributors specifically address oil as it is represented in cultural productions, including the visual arts, popular culture, corporate advertising, and national branding campaigns – for example, in the photography and filmmaking of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal,
Peter Mettler, Emmet Gowin, Ursula Biemann, Allan Sekula, Ernst
Logar, Matt Coolidge, and George Osodi; in the visual and installation art of Portia Munson, Song Dong, Melanie Smith, and Choi
Introduction: On Petrocultures
13
Jeong-Hwa; in modernist poetry, pulp fiction, and the literature and
criticism of Upton Sinclair, Stephen King, and Amitav Ghosh; in the
lyrics of such songs as “Baby Got Back” (1992) and “Mustang Sally”
(1965); and in the films watched by a generation of children who
have grown up seeing oil culture animated by Pixar.
The chapters have been organized into six sections, grouped in
ways that, when read against one another, provide added layers of
nuance and meaning that help to outline what it means to live in a
twenty-first-century petroculture and what it might mean to extract
ourselves from our petro-driven realities. Energy humanities scholars are interdisciplinary and come to issues around oil and energy
drawing on a range analytic traditions. The styles of some contributors reflect their backgrounds in social and political thought and
cultural studies, while others draw on practices more typical of literary analysis and close reading. Still others, such as Geo Takash and
Allison Rowe, represent creative research interventions that mobilize visual and textual imaginaries of the past and present to render
visible specific networks in the web of planetary oil relations. The
multidisciplinarity of this collection and the interdisciplinary work
of the individual chapters is representative of ongoing work in the
energy humanities – a field in which scholars are collectively tackling new and arising environmental and social challenges.
The essays collected here were presented at the first Petrocultures
conference, held at Campus Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta
in September 2012. As academics working in literary and cultural
studies in Alberta and living in Edmonton, the largest city located
closest to the Alberta oil sands, we could not avoid studying the
impact and effects of fossil fuels on the space and place in which
we lived. Since the turn of the century, when extraction activity in
Northern Alberta ramped up significantly, the oil sands have become
one of the world’s most important sites of struggle over our energy
and environmental futures. This especially dirty source of energy,
with an extremely low energy return on energy invested (an eroei
of about 3.0),19 has become for many an index of everything that is
wrong with the way in which we use energy today. The oil sands have
become increasingly visible in recent years due to the struggle over
the Keystone XL pipeline – which was supposed to transport oil from
Alberta across the Canada-US border to refinery and storage facilities in Oklahoma – and the other major pipelines proposed to take
14
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
oil from the oil sands to Canada’s east and west coasts. When we20
began the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta
in 2010, we were surprised by the gaps we found in the critical literature on fossil fuels in general and on the oil sands in particular.
While there were existing activist and environmental texts advocating for renewable and sustainable energy, and historical studies of
oil and energy systems (notably the groundbreaking work of David
Nye),21 investigations of the social imaginaries brought into being
by the energies of fossil fuels – which is what we termed “petrocultures” – were in short supply.
It was in an effort to canvas the existing state of research into
petrocultures that we staged the 2012 conference, which was originally planned to take place over one-and-a-half days. The response
to our call for papers came as a pleasant shock and surprise. We
received so many proposals – and so many superb ones – that the
inaugural conference became a six-day event: a Petrocultures art
show at Gallery@501 in Sherwood Park, Alberta, four days of sharing papers in Edmonton, and a two-day trip to the home of the oil
sands in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (with one day in
the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta and a day spent with community members, leaders, and elders in the Métis and First Nations community of Fort McKay). A second Petrocultures conference, held in
2014 at McGill University in Montreal, confirmed this initial flurry
of interest: researchers from around the world are posing the questions and seeking the answers to the ways in which oil and energy
have shaped our forms of being, belonging, and behaving. The third
Petrocultures conference, held in 2016 at Memorial University in
St John’s, has established this biennial conference as a major event,
gathering scholars from around the world and across the disciplines
who are investigating the social, cultural, and political implications
of energy practices and systems. As the field of energy humanities
develops, expanding to cover more and more territory geographically, conceptually, and historically, it has become possible to identify
areas of petroculture that require more critical exploration than they
have received thus far. In 2015, in conjunction with colleagues at the
University of Alberta, the Emily Carr University of Art and Design,
and the University of Manitoba, we co-authored a report that was
intended to gather knowledge about research on Indigenous communities and energy, and research-creation projects on fossil fuel
Introduction: On Petrocultures
15
cultures and environmental change.22 The collection of essays that
we have brought together here deals with a wide range of issues and
topics related to the significance of energy for contemporary society.
As we are still near the beginning of our collective exploration of
energy humanities, it is necessary to continue to expand the scope
of investigation. We expect that Petrocultures will set the stage for
deeper, more extensive, and more expansive analyses of energy and
power, with specific attention to the sites and spaces in which energy
intersects with class, gender, and race – particularly in relationship
to treaty rights and traditional Aboriginal energy-use practices,23
given the central role of Indigenous communities not only in providing insights into other modes of engaging with the environment, but
also in approving or resisting extraction projects.24
As criticisms of carbon- and energy-intensive projects become
increasingly common, we need more than ever a critical project
adequate to energy’s pervasiveness across contemporary experience. As scientists and publics mobilize knowledge into new calls for
moratoriums,25 debates about oil have stalled around the predictable opposition of environment versus economics, drill versus don’t
drill. We can neither give up oil all at once, nor can we continue to
shape our societies around it: as is so often the case, here, too, each
pole of the “either/or” discussion on fossil fuels constitutes a way of
avoiding the real questions that need to be answered. The purpose of
studying the petrocultures we inhabit is to uncover and elaborate the
political potential and theoretical nuances crowded out in current
forms of public discourse. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture provides much-needed research that addresses head-on the conceptual,
philosophical, and theoretical challenges that emerge from a sustained examination of the social and cultural significance of energy
in various forms, oil being only the most prevalent form at present.
As an ongoing project, the study of petrocultures confronts critical
issues around oil and energy, providing crucial insights into what it
means to live at this historical moment and what we need to do to
imagine and create new ways of being.
Oil and its outcomes – speed, plastics, and the luxuries of capitalism, to name a few – have lubricated our relationship to one another
and the environment for the duration of the twentieth century. As
we struggle to transition to less carbon-intensive energies and lifestyles, this collection provides scholars and engaged publics with a
16
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
more nuanced understanding of oil as an energy source and substance imbricated into every aspect of our daily lived realities. Oil
transformed our lives in the twentieth century. Might we transform
our lives in the twenty-first century, reshaping our petrocultures
into societies whose energy use doesn’t imperil the future and the
environment we inhabit?
notes
1 For instance, in June 2016 Norway proclaimed that it would aim
to have net zero carbon emissions by 2030 by severely limiting fossil fuel use. See Arthur Neslen, “Norway Pledges to Become Climate
Neutral by 2030,” Guardian, 15 June 2016, accessed 4 July 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/15/norway
-pledges-to-become-climate-neutral-by-2030.
2 For Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “energy humanities” is a field
that contends that “our energy and environmental dilemmas are fundamentally problems of ethics, habits, values, institutions, beliefs and
power – all areas of expertise of the humanities and humanistic social
sciences.” See Boyer and Szeman, “The Rise of the Energy Humanities,” University Affairs (March 2014): 40.
Though this field is still nascent, this present collection is in dialogue with several works: Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, eds., Oil
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Gerry Canavan,
Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Ecology & Ideology,” Polygraph 22 (2010):
1–32; Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction,” New Republic 2 (March 1992):
29–34; Peter Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” New
Formations 69.4 (2010): 81–97; Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil,
Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum and
Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013); James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (New York: Verso,
2013); Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (New York: Verso,
2011); Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western
Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and
Introduction: On Petrocultures
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
17
Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007);
Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Fueling Culture: 101 Words on Energy and Environment (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017); Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis, eds.,
“Sighting Oil,” Imaginations 3.2 (2012); and Patricia Yaeger et al.,
“Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources,” pmla 126:2 (2011):
305–26.
Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions (New York: Praeger, 2010), 105.
Dale Jamieson, “Energy, Ethics and the Transformation of Nature,”
in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis G. Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16.
Smil, Energy Transitions, 14.
See J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental
History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2000).
Ghosh, “Petrofiction.”
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 29.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical
Inquiry 35 (2009): 208.
In A Theory of Justice, political philosopher John Rawls famously
begins his elaboration of the principles of social justice by articulating a thought experiment – the “original position” – a hypothetical
ground zero from which the principles of liberalism were reconstituted. Rawls doesn’t consider the impact of available energy on the
principles established within the thought experiment. How might
these principles look different if they had to account for energy justice as well as social justice? Might an awareness of declining levels
of energy alter the principles advocated? Rawls, A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999).
Ruth Irwin provides an excellent overview of the range of logics that
undergird modern social life in “Ecological Ethics in the Context of
Climate Change: Feminist and Indigenous Critique of Modernity,”
International Social Science Journal 64.211–212 (2013): 111–23.
Ruth Cowan details social experiments in industrializing aspects
of women’s domestic work – such as laundry and cooking – which
ultimately failed in the face of socio-cultural pressures and advertising campaigns. For example, a market for the washing machine was
created by undermining industrial laundries via discourses of suspect
18
13
14
15
16
17
18
Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson
hygiene, which were linked to racism. Cooking as the responsibility of
each mother-wife was reinforced through concerns about how communal kitchens and other social-housing experiments that eliminated
this task from daily life posed a threat to Western family values and
insinuated parallels with communism. See especially chapters 3 and
4 of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of
Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
(New York: Basic Books, 1983) for a detailed analysis of the ways in
which technological development has affected (or not affected) gendered divisions of labour.
Andrew S. Gross, “Cars, Postcards, and Patriotism: Tourism and
National Politics in the United States, 1893–1929,” Pacific Coast Philology 40.1 (2005), 85.
For more details on the gendered aspects of oil and energy, see Sheena
Wilson’s “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petro-Sexual Relations,” in
Oil Culture, ed. Barrett and Worden, 244–66.
See, for instance, Simpson’s talk, “The Chiefs Two Bodies: Theresa
Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” at “Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms,” RACE Network’s 14th
Annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference, University
of Alberta, Edmonton, accessed 20 August 2016, https://vimeo.com/
110948627.
This argument concerning the genocidal, gendered, and human rights
aspects of oil and energy is more extensively described in Sheena
Wilson’s “Energy Imaginaries at the Impasse,” Materialism and the
Critique of Energy, eds. Brent Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti (Chicago
and Edmonton: MCM Prime Press, 2017). See also Sheena Wilson, “Oil
Ethics,” American Book Review 33.2 (2012), 8–9; and “Gender,” in
Fueling Culture: 101 Words on Energy and Environment, ed. Imre
Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017).
See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stroemer, “The Anthropocene,”
igbp [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme] Newsletter 41
(2000): 17.
See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,
Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015):
159–65; and Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology
and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).
Introduction: On Petrocultures
19
19 See A.R. Brandt, J. Englander, and S. Bharadwaj, “The Energy Efficiency of Oil Sands Extraction: Energy Return Ratios from 1970 to
2010,” Energy 55 (2013): 693.
20 “We” in this context refers to the first two authors, who founded and
co-direct the Petrocultures Research Group.
21 See, for instance, Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a
New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992).
22 See Imre Szeman et al., “On the Energy Humanities: Contributions
from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts to Understanding
Energy Transition and Energy Impasse,” SSHRC Imagining Canada’s
Future initiative, Knowledge Synthesis Grants: Energy and Natural
Resources. 13 May 2016. Available at http://www.ideas-idees.ca/
sites/default/files/sites/default/uploads/general/2016/2016-sshrc-ksgszeman.pdf.
23 Warren Cariou, “Aboriginal,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words on
Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and
Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
24 To take just one example, in Canada in June 2016, the Northern
Gateway Pipeline approval was overturned by the federal courts,
based on a failure of the company backing the pipeline to consult
with First Nations.
25 Sheila Pratt, “Researchers’ Open Letter Calls for Moratorium on New
Oil Sands Projects,” Edmonton Journal, 10 June 2015, accessed 10 June
2015, http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Researchers+open+letter+calls
+moratorium+oilsands+projects/11125320/story.html.