Petrocultures

Course Description:
What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of energy? That is, what if we approached William Wordsworth’s Romantic ruminations on the “sublime” crafts of “men’s arts” as a praxis for thinking about the material forces of the sublime—“motion and means...on land and sea” made possible first by the winds that would move commerce across the Atlantic Ocean in the long sixteenth century and soon thereafter by coal? What if we understood colonial occupation in the context of East Africa or throughout Latin America in terms of the transnational plantation economies that would also be fueled by wind or hydropower or coal, and thus conducted postcolonial critiques of novels like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Autumn of the Patriarch or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat accordingly? Might we then understand energy not merely in terms of the “fuel-injected” American dream featured in a Bruce Springsteen song, but instead as the very means of fueling culture? Might we then appreciate that the conventional tropes of literary expression and critique are the products of the material forces contemporary to each work? That petroleum, for example, isn’t simply a theme, but is that which enables the very production of culture?

As a seminar on Petrocultures, and an introduction to the Energy Humanities, this course shall focus on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture.  We shall explore a wide archive of cultural works that represent, in the words of literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, the “ages of wood…coal…oil” and ultimately alternative fuel sources like wind and solar power. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Nawal El Saadawi. ,Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Herman Melville, and many others will guide us through our new geological epoch—call it the Anthropocene or the Thermocene—illustrating the intersections of cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression.

As we also will come to learn, there is no “age of wood,” for example, without a correlative commitment to Enlightenment notions of “improvement,” whether of self or land. There is likewise no age of oil, nor of wind, without a persistent commitment to such notions of civilizational progress as we see in the paeans to industry and “enlightenment” that generally characterize popular political thought. Thus, while we end with an exploration of alternative energy—alternatives, that is, to fossilized carbon—we likewise question whether a simple shift in fuel is sufficient to the task of averting the sorts of apocalyptic scenarios presented in novels like Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Ultimately, we will follow the After Oil collective in asking how aesthetic forms represent (and often reinforce) energy regimes and how, in the face of an overwhelming commitment to disaster porn, we might “frame the unimaginable,” which is to say life after carbon.

By employing a feminist lens to “follow the oil” and trace “the webs of relations and cultural meanings through which oil is imagined as a ‘vital’ and ‘strategic’ resource,”I wish to interrogate the relationship between human rights and gender and racial equality and the petro- discourses that are newly oriented around ecology in our contemporary moment. As with many cultural transformations and their associated ideological turns, women’s relationship to oil, to the environment, and to the petrocultures of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries in the West is portrayed in the mainstream media in a limited number of largely superficial ways: first, through embedded feminism and women’s rights as they intersect with human and ethnocultural rights; second, through consumerism; and third, through the recuperation of the female body as a canvas on which to spectacularize politics— largely with explicit consumer aims...

This essay investigates artist and scholar Warren Cariou’s aesthetic attempts to challenge the operational logic and legitimacy of petromodernity. I offer a formal analysis of Warren Cariou’s creative work, in particular his 2012 “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto” and his 2014 “petrography.” I argue that Cariou’s work spills across form and genre, thereby challenging an aesthetic and form of logic that seeks to sequester the environmental and social ills of petromodernity. Moreover, I make explicit the way irrationality serves as an implicit critique of settler colonialism throughout Cariou’s work.

PLEASE SUPPORT THE JOURNAL: published version available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.1.3.014. This essay offers a discussion of the goals, key questions, and outcomes of my undergraduate course, "Literature and Oil," with particular attention to the "Oil Inventory," a writing assignment I devised (borrowing from Edward Said's citation of Antonio Gramsci) to ask students to trace the presence and absence of oil in their lives.

This seminar investigates intersections between architecture—as a practice, set of objects, and research orientation—and climate change, one of the defining phenomena of our age. With a focus on the contemporary but eye to the recent past, we will begin to map out the spectrum of manners in which architecture has already engaged with climate change as well as how these might be more fully invented, interrogated, and instituted. The discipline of architecture has been relatively slow to take up the vast and highly unsettling topic of climate change in ways beyond the technical (e.g., new materials, efficiency standards) despite the fact that issues of a social, political, economic, ethical, and even existential order are also, if not foremost, at root and at stake. Our own class discussions will thus wrangle with a set of unwieldy and interrelated questions, including: At what scales does architecture intersect with climate change? Are the local and planetary newly entwined and, if so, how might architecture respond to and elucidate this condition? Which skills do architects bring to the table, and what is their revised role, in light of this accelerating and encompassing phenomenon? Does climate change demand a reimagining of the field? What would architecture look like that, rather than sheltering us from our surroundings, instead served as an interface between the two— orienting itself toward the human and nonhuman at the same time? Students should come away with a clearer sense of the stakes of climate change for architecture and of architecture for climate change, as well as deepened familiarity with relevant projects from the present and recent past. Guest speakers: Mark Dion (Artist / USA), James Graham (Dir. Publications at Columbia GSAPP / USA), Dehlia Hannah (Curator & Researcher / USA/DK), Lindsay Bremner (Dir. Arch. Research, Univ. of Westminster (UK) , Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (DESIGN EARTH / USA)

This paper examines the ways in which ideas and discourses
generated by global phenomena (such as the Oil Encounter) travel
and get reframed in local topographies. It asks how one might
reposition hermeneutics appropriate to a particular context without
falling into the trap of an epistemology that is purportedly global but
representing other interests? The environment in which crude oil is
extracted has been termed heterogeneous and international. Amitav
Ghosh describes it as one that is “lacking in a sense of place,” while
James Ferguson considers it an “insular and socially thin neoliberal landscape of deregulated enterprises.” This paper goes against the
grain by challenging the formations that undergird some of these
assumptions. It takes the Niger Delta as a landscape in which quotidian
life and the oil infrastructure are intimately intertwined and ask what
insights might literary depictions of this context give about the form
of globalism that operates within the industrial complex through
which oil is extracted. Reading Ibiwari Ikiriko’s poetry collection Oily
Tears of the Delta, the paper reflects on how the text stages a dialogue
with the global by addressing itself to the oil infrastructure in that
environment. It discusses Ikiriko’s poetry as one that encourages
the reader to think about locality and geopolitics as possible sites
of conflict, as sites of understanding power and the kinds of agency
that they enable in the environments where oil is extracted to feed
global consumption.

Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—creating the #NoDAPL movement. I am concerned with how critics of #NoDAPL often focus on defending the pipeline’s safety precautions or the many attempts the Army Corps of Engineers made at consulting the Tribe. Yet critics rarely engage what LaDonna Brave Bull Allard calls “the larger story.” To me, as an Indigenous supporter of #NoDAPL, one thread of the larger story concerns how DAPL is an injustice against the Tribe. The type of injustice is one that many other Indigenous peoples can identify with—U.S. settler colonialism. I seek to show how there are many layers to the settler colonial injustice behind DAPL that will take me, by the end of this essay, from U.S. disrespect of treaty promises in the 19th century to environmental sustainability and climate change in the 21st century. Updated in July 2020, and will be republished in updated form in 2020 (or 2021) in Contemporary Moral Issues 5th Edition, edited by Lawrence Hinman and published by Taylor Frances. May be cited with this pagination and referencing academia.edu URL. Originally published as Whyte, K. 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism. RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities: 19 (1): 154-169. Republication (2019) in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change. Edited by C. Miller and J. Crane, 320-337. University of Colorado Press.

2018 Early draft of chapter to appear in the forthcoming collection, Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi.

Feminist critic Sheena Wilson has recently called for a lens of “critical petro-intersectionality” through which to “expose how the inequities of race, class and gender are not only perpetuated in our current petroculture but also actively deployed as rhetorical strategies to literally and figuratively buoy and sustain existing power sources: oil and the neoliberal petro-state” (177). In particular, Wilson has critiqued how mainstream Euro-American media often instrumentalizes rhetorics that invoke women’s rights in order to rationalize colonial extraction politics and which position female bodies as sites of spectacularized petro-politics, while marginalizing the agency of women in acts of petro-resistance (177). This essay will seek to extend this approach to the gendering of world oil literature by examining two examples of feminist petrofiction from frontiers of oil extraction, Nawal El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom, set in a petro-state resembling Saudi Arabia, and Laura Restrepo’s The Dark Bride, set in Colombia. I argue that in these texts questions of gender, petro-sexuality and the relation between energy and women’s work in the realm of social reproduction are explicitly foregrounded in relation to oil imperialism.

Thanatophobia (or death anxiety) has long been a concern of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein, for example, held that fear of death was the primary source of all anxiety. In this chapter, I explore thanatophobia as a way of making sense of the unreasonable, indeed maniacal, attachment of the global North to fossil fuels despite mounting signs that the trajectory of fossil civilization will lead to ecological collapse (and widespread death). Building on Stephanie LeMenager's analysis of the affective terrain of petroculture, I argue that high carbon path dependency is evidence of an irrational attachment to the pleasures and luxuries of fossil-fueled modernity, especially in those parts of the world that have benefited the most from them. This attachment involves a deep fear of existential loss-not only of profits but of a whole way of life-were fossil fuels to disappear entirely. Thus, death anxiety helps to explain what I term here "petromania" - the hallucinatory state of the global North that its intense energy use and growthoriented economics can be extended infinitely into the future.

Long pre-print draft of chapter submitted to an Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan and forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.]

In this chapter, I further refine the category of the ecogothic to delineate a subset that I call ‘extractive gothic,’ ecogothic narratives set in contexts of extractivism that can operate either through extractivist or anti-extractivist aesthetics. If extractivist aesthetics tend to revolve around phobic conceptions of nature’s resistance to extractivist technics, anti-extractivist aesthetics turn around the horror of Capitalist Nature itself. Extractive gothic tends to be ‘preoccupied with energy at the point of extraction’ (Henry 2019, 406) and turns on tropes of drills and dredges, its plots often hinging on the terrifying consequences of delving too deep: of unearthing monsters from beneath; excavating horrifying substances that pollute the topside; or triggering the uncanny fusing of oil and coal into massified bodies and sentient matter. The vertical frontiers of industrialized extraction are concretized in gothic imagery of dark tunnels, shafts, bore holes, mines, and wells; its settings are spatialized on vertical axes, offering uncanny revelations of the previously concealed undersides and recesses of subterranean or suboceanic terrains. At the same time, extractive gothic’s affective registers, particularly in peripheral or (post)colonial settings, are characterized not only by dread and horror, but by exhaustion, expressed through motifs of draining, sucking, and pulverizing, that express the extractive logic of the capitalist world-ecology itself, which extends core-periphery divisions by extracting massive volumes of ‘raw’ materials from peripheries for export according to the demand of capitalist cores.  As such, extractive gothic fictions are often global in their horizon even when rooted in local sites of extraction; they are not only ecogothic, but globalgothic: permeated with a systemic consciousness of the world-scale of imperialist and capitalist extraction, and of the accelerating planetary impacts of energy and resource extraction, whether as global warming or other forms of ecological catastrophe.

"Is not every modern novel to some extent an oil novel? Can we say that the Great American Oil Novel does exist—as
a Saudi novel? As a Scottish or Mexican one? Or
do we forego worrying about these categories and realize energy forms and periods as presenting the means for a truly world literary form? Oil literature is simultaneously global and domestic."

A significant area of “effective response” to the predominance of oil in the modern world system lies in attempts to energize interpretations of cultural production, specifically literary fiction. Fiction, in its various modes, genres, and histories, offers a significant (and relatively untapped) repository for the energy aware scholar to demonstrate how, through successive epochs, particularly embedded kinds of energy create a predominant (and oftentimes alternative) culture of being and imagining in the world; or- ganizing and enabling a prevalent mode of living, thinking, moving, dwelling and working. In industrial modernity this has been largely reliant on the extraction of fossil fuels. The extent to which this energy regime has both fostered and been reliant upon a culture of extraction is of increasing interest. Yet what is recognized as extractive cultural production remains questionable.

This paper focuses on Nigeria’s Niger Delta using literary representations from the region to interrogate the oil encounter and an exploration of its impact on social and environmental structures. The paper situates Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & Home Songs (1998) within the discourse of environmental justice and ecocriticism, reflecting on the poet’s excoriation of the oil encounter as the harbinger of environmental degradation. Of particular interest is the unique and alternative insight – a kind of insider/indigenous knowledge – this text provides in the agitations for environmental remediation and social justice. The paper argues that through the geography of lived and imagined memory of the pre-oil exploration past, the poet stretches our scientific and technological imagination in proffering solutions to the environmental and social challenges that attend the oil encounter. The poet calls for a lived kind of environmentalism as he invites the reader to inhabit the cultural world of his Niger Delta where he imaginatively recalls the past – of his childhood – of fishing and farming; when ‘the old ways were still very vibrant’ (Ojaide, Poetic Imagination 1996:121). The paper concludes that this near utopian past which the poet versifies, becomes a model for the remediation of the oil-polluted Niger Delta environment. Part of the work of this paper, then, reflects on the particular contributions that literary and cultural perspectives can offer in apprehending the twin issues of justice – environmental and social – occasioned by the oil encounter, and how these perspectives might fruitfully enter into a conversation that is largely dominated by the sciences.

Psychoanalytic interpretation can help us understand the blockages and fantasies hindering the exodus from fossil fuel use that contemporary science tells us is urgently necessary. A reading of Anna Kavan's 1967 science fiction novel Ice reveals an "energy unconscious" at work by which petroleum fuels a violent and masculinist resolution to the alienation and fragmentation experienced by the protagonists. Such interpretations allow us to recognize how culture and subjectivity are shaped by petroleum, opening a space to work towards framing new narratives and values.

The special issue, “Energy Humanities,” gathers experimental and brief accounts of the cultural history of energy in order to figure new research in the emerging fields of Environmental and Energy Humanities. From plastics to oil and literature, pedagogy to pipelines and activism, loving oil to understanding energy infrastructure, this collection offers a snapshot of the various ways one might approach questions of energy in the humanities.

Article in "Paradoxa", republished in "Strange Horizons" @ http://strangehorizons.com/2016/20160215/macdonald-a.shtml
The contribution of culture and cultural critique to the energy dependencies and dilemmas we face has only just begun to be debated. The “Energy Humanities” interrogate how disciplinary outlooks, methodological conventions and theoretical objectives can elicit “the energy unconscious” in cultural productions. In many ways, sf is the genre best placed to advance our understanding not only of present and future energy crises but also the manner in which we (fail to) envisage and conceive energy as a matter for culture. Sf frequently registers such issues as the future of fuel and mobility, resource imperialism, “realistic” modes of sustainability, and alternative modes of living in geographies and economies altered and reformed by the demands of the environmental crisis....There is a general consensus that future fuel and energy technology has to be radically unlike what we have at present, and I argue that even irresponsible and unimaginable visions of energy futures offer a workable platform to question what we envisage as the future of energy forms and systems—and the scale of our present “worldly” and systemic desires.

What work can our work do in the world? This is the gnawing question for all scholarship that aims not only to understand the world but to change it. Reflecting on the energy humanities concept of impasse, I argue in this Foreword that a focus on inertia, in the sense of resistance to change in an object's state of motion, helps to capture the sense of hypermobility that is, paradoxically, characteristic of what Mark Simpson and Imre Szeman have theorized as the "stuckness" standing in the way of energy transition.

Support the Journal: https://www.soapboxjournal.net/print-editions/3-0-in-lieu-of-an-ending-impasse

Long draft of a chapter to appear in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment, edited by Malcolm Sen, forthcoming from CUP. Please do not cite without requesting permission.] 

Applying the insights of energy humanities to contemporary Irish novels, this essay takes a first step towards theorizing “the energy unconscious” of post-1970s Irish culture,  by exploring the “material relating to energy forms that can be mined and discerned throughout the history of literature.”  In so doing, I follow Graeme Macdonald’s call for energy criticism that examines the relationship between culture and environmental history in order to “advance our understanding not only about the present and future energy crises we face, but also the manner in which we (fail to) envisage and conceive energy as a matter for culture as much as it is cultural matter.”  Taking a broad approach to “energy futures” across a mixture of genres, I analyse the ways in which energy imaginaries feature in contemporary Irish fiction, including Eilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Bray House, Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, Kevin McDermott's Valentina, Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive, Sarah Maria Griffin's Spare and Found Parts, and Mike McCormack's Solar Bones, focusing in particular on how these novels imagine unevenness, spatialized inequality, and dependency as constitutive features of the neoliberal energy regime in its Irish manifestation.

The arrival of the anthropocene in the humanities has unsettled some of the most dearly held concepts and assumptions of humanistic inquiry. There is considerable debate over its different uses as well as its periodization, but it most certainly names the epoch when the human species becomes a geologic force, altering Earth systems through the burning of fossil fuels, the expansions of industrial agriculture, and exponential population growth, among other factors. 1 As a range of literary and cultural critics, historians , philosophers, legal scholars, and others have noted, the mere fact that we can no longer speak of a division of human and nature has profound consequences for disciplines that have long foregrounded human history, thought, feeling, and cultural production. 2 If studying the anthropocene requires our methods to thread together human and nonhuman nature, Earth systems and world-system, security studies must now enfold environment-making, natural resources, and nonhuman natures into the more well-traveled areas of financial, geopolitical, and, on the whole, human security. This essay turns to a single extraction zone, the oil and gas rich Bakken shale formation in North Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan, to offer a few ways to think through the anthropocene and to highlight the role aesthetics might play in such thinking. The questions that drive this essay emerged from the collective intellectual work of a group of scholars that participated in an Antipode workshop based in the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana in 2015. 3 We wanted to locate the anthropocene, to ground it in a particular time and place and see what forms of knowledge we might generate by resisting the large, sweeping historical narratives associated with the anthropocene. For us, the temptation to think in terms of " species, " a generalized " anthropos, " or along vast temporal scales risked losing the complexities of historically and geographically located experiences. Since then, I have wondered about how to engage the enormous conceptual and philosophical challenges of the anthropocene without abandoning decades of humanities research and the political commitments that have animated and resulted from that research. I want to pursue two sets of questions that became important to me during my time in North Dakota. The first set is focused on aesthetics (how we look) and the second on sites (where we look). So, the first set: What aesthetic forms and practices emerge from a particular extraction zone and make it visible? How do artworks configure the drive for energy security with the harm extraction routinely brings to human life and nonhuman natures? Second, what happens when we locate the anthropocene in a specific time and place? By what means can

Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers' Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical features, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such features: (1) notions of "Nordicity"; (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, often seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels) , and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works, which draws on a Nordic tradition of painting and literature, and which al...

[This is a long, pre-print draft of an article to appear in a special issue on“Being Fossil”of Études anglaises, edited by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. Please do not cite without requesting permission.]

This essay will read crime fiction not just as world-literature, but as world-oil- literature, drawing on the insights of the emergent disciplines of energy humanities and petrocultures. I will compare contemporary novels that depict crimes occurring in four key global contexts of oil extraction or concentrated oil wealth, including Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Shadow of the Shadow, Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising, Kwei Quartey’s Murder at Cape Three Points, and Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Nairobi Heat. Taibo II’s novel is set in Mexico City in 1922, where a quartet of leftist friends including a lawyer, a crime reporter, a poet and veteran of Pancho Villa’s cavalry, and an anarchist Chinese-Mexican union organizer, investigate murders surrounding the Plan de Mata Redonda - a conspiracy of army colonels, U.S. senators, and U.S. oil barons to engineer a coup with the aim to establish an American protectorate in the oil-rich lands of the Gulf Coast and thereby thwart the revolutionary government’s plans to nationalize the oil industry. Attica Locke’s novel takes place in Houston, Texas in the 1980s, investigating the tensions unleashed by the conflict between striking dock workers and the oil-driven interests of the city against the larger backdrop of the US energy policies following the 1970s energy crisis. Quartey sets his novel in the twenty-first century boom town of Sekondi-Takoradi near Cape Three Points- the recently-discovered oil fields in Ghana’s territorial waters-amidst the tensions swirling around a coverup of violations of national safety regulations on an offshore rig run by a UK oil company and resistance by local environmentalists against the plans for the development of oil infrastructure that threaten nature reserves along the coast. Finally, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Nairobi Heat moves between Madison, Wisconsin and Nairobi, Kenya, uncovering a criminal conspiracy to use a humanitarian aid organization the Never Again Foundation - a charity supposedly benefiting victims of the Rwandan genocide - as a money-laundering operation to provide tax evasion services to transnational corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell.

In recent years, the concept of “peak oil”—the moment when global oil production peaks and a train of economic, social, and political catastrophes accompany its subsequent decline—has captured the imagination of a surprisingly large number of Americans as well as scholars and created a quiet, yet intense underground movement. In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresaw—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.

“This is a highly significant, original, and engaging book. Schneider-Mayerson provides a sophisticated analysis of the rise of libertarianism in the United States and articulates well how the struggle to form a collective response reflects a decline of trust in social institutions and the rise of individualism. Peak Oil is well-written, compelling, and very timely. It will no doubt be of interest to readers both inside and outside of the academy.” -- Kari Marie Norgaard, author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life

“Schneider-Mayerson’s inventive and illuminating study of the peak oil movement is just the kind of scholarly intervention we need now to help us grapple fully with the social and political challenges we face. If his exploration of the practices and beliefs of the ‘Peakists’ is cause for worry, it isn’t because of how they view fossil fuels or its environmental impact. It’s in the largely individual response of peak oil advocates to what is of necessity a collective problem. This mainstreaming of a libertarian ethos in the United States and elsewhere—on both right and left—should ring alarm bells. As much an analysis of contemporary US political culture as it is about the politics of climate change, Peak Oil makes for a stellar addition to debates in which we all have a stake today.” --  Imre Szeman, author of Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture

“From Mad Max to Mad Men, this dead-on critique of long held beliefs about masculinity and traditions of American individualism and techno-optimism—all steadily becoming associated with a ‘shift towards libertarianism’—is by turns entertaining, insightful, and troubling. The book clearly outlines how these traditions and beliefs present daunting challenges to communities interested in organizing and implementing effective and timely responses to accelerating global climate change.” -- Joni Adamson, coeditor of American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship

"Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil (2015) is a compelling and nuanced account of the peak oil movement in the era of climate crisis. Organized online between 2004 and 2011, the peak oil movement, Schneider-Mayerson argues, can also be thought of as a phenomenon or community of individuals sharing information, but mostly acting alone. In this timely, engaging, well-written, and accessible book, Schneider-Mayerson argues that a libertarian shift in culture within the context of environmental crisis explains the individualistic behavior of peakists even as they, in line with their overwhelmingly liberal political ideologies, recognize the need for collective action. Peak Oil pushes readers to recognize the urgent need for political action on climate change while simultaneously providing a thoughtful and sympathetic explanation for why so many people respond to environmental crisis in individualistic ways. Readers alarmed by climate crisis will connect with peakist impulses toward self-sufficiency while gaining a deeper understanding of the political and cultural milieu that informs political inaction on climate change. Peak Oil offers an in-depth portrait of peakists—who they are, how they compare to the general population, how they became “peak aware,” and what they do with their knowledge. Yet, it also does much more. Through detailed analysis of the history of beliefs about abundance and scarcity, oil production and prices, the libertarian shift, the development of the internet, and American apocalyptic thought, it uses a story about peakists to shed light on broad trends at the intersection of energy, technology, cultural imaginations, masculinity, and political economy. For this reason, it is a useful text for readers in these diverse fields and for those interested in how historical and contemporary trends inform collective capacity for imagining a future within and beyond climate crisis." -- Corrie Gross, Energy Research & Social Science (2017)

"The strength of Peak Oil resides in its judicious, even-handed approach. Schneider-Mayerson neither idealizes nor vilifies his subjects.He commends them for their insights about petro-capitalist constraints, yet he does not hesitate to call out their limitations. For example, in a fascinating final chapter on the racial and gender dynamics of peak oil, he reveals that peakists often imagined a post-oil future as a reversion to a rugged, pioneer, white masculinity that aimed to “make men hard again” (142). This reversion to white patriarchy—what Schneider-Mayerson calls “retrosexuality”—registered cultural anxieties about masculinity and whiteness in an era of feminism, deindustrialization, multiculturalism, and a late capitalist economy dominated by automation and service work. Ultimately, however, Schneider-Mayerson correctly points out that whatever their biases, peakists were attempting to do something extraordinarily difficult: imagine life after petroleum while living in a society fully saturated by it. And today the political fatalism of peakists is unnerving, he concludes, not because it is so rare but because it is so pervasive. The powerful message is that within late petro-capitalism, hope and imagination are in short—but desperately needed—supply." -- Natasha Zaretsky, Environment and Society (2016)

"The intricacy of Peak Oil... makes the book a fascinating window into an American subculture often parodied but rarely studied. With preternatural care, Schneider-Mayerson displays an ability to connect the words of his interlocutors with their broader political and social context that makes the book as a whole an enjoyable reading experience recommended for scholars, undergraduate students, and the public at large." -- Kai Bosworth, Cultural Geographies (2017)

"A demonstration of the ability of American studies to illuminate broader cultural trends beyond self-conscious political ideology... a fascinating look into the development of a left subculture that grew in adherents largely during the Iraq War... the book reaches beyond a small coterie of intellectual influencers to explain how a group of believers can be a microcosm to understand broader currents of individualism and apocalypticism in American culture.” -- Rebecca Hill, American Quarterly (2018)

This paper proposes a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho's novel Campo de Trânsito (2007) as a literary response to the neoliberal financialisation of oil. Exploring the correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the abstraction of narrative modes, I argue that materialist motifs of petroleum extraction and workers' resistance in Borges Coelho's text register the 'porosity' of Mozambique's extractives sector, which in recent years has seen an influx of foreign investment after the discovery of globally significant quantities of oil and natural gas. Following the recent move to rethink world literature through the prism of petro-modernity (WReC 2015; Szeman 2017; Macdonald 2017), this investigation invites new angles of literary comparison for which oil would function as a necessary representational logic beyond its particular figuration as a plot-driver at the level of content.

The discovery of the treasures of archeology and energy have been inextricably linked.  Antiquities, like oil, rarely figured as the patrimony of the people who lived above or alongside them and bases of excavation, which doubled as proto-military bases, marked some of the first colonial outposts. By the mid-nineteenth century, the race was on among England, France, Germany, and the United States to exhume, survey, and map the Ottoman Middle East.  License to excavate marked the coveted prize because the collective, unspoken desire was for what lay underground and the search for one type of treasure could easily translate into exploration for the other.  The people living above were easily ignored, discounted, or disparaged for failing to bring value to the surface.  Archeological expeditions doubled as surveys of potential oil wells and military reconnaissance; surveyors and cartographers doubled as amateur archeologists.