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Référence bibliographique
Stacey Balkan, Swaralipi Nandi (eds.), Oil Fictions : World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).

1 In their 2021 anthology, Oil Fictions, editors Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi bring together fifteen essays to interrogate qualifications of the literary subcategory petrofiction and propose a new, more expansive genre, called oil fictions. This insightful collection of essays not only responds to Amitav Ghosh’s foundational review, “Petrofiction : The Oil Encounter and the Novel”, but includes Ghosh’s own updated comments in Chapter 1 which provide an explanation of his circumstances when he wrote the piece in 1992. Because the contributors each respond to Ghosh’s foundational review, together the essays form a wonderful opportunity for readers to understand the implications of his two main claims. One, his observation that there are too few novels concerning the Oil Encounter from the perspective of the lived cultures in the Global South and two, his skepticism around the novel’s potential as a form for expressing these stories. Ghosh argues that the novel is not a useful literary form to tell stories about oil and that we have not yet developed a form that is workable.

2 Despite their unique approaches to the question of oil fiction, nearly every essay’s author refers to Ghosh’s review, reiterates his concept of the “Oil Encounter” (“the inter-twining of the fates of Americans and those living in the Middle East around this commodity”), [1] challenges petrofiction’s current category parameters, and lends support for the novel as an effective vehicle for communicating our petrosubject experience. In this way, Oil Fictions provides meaningful clarification on Ghosh’s thinking and builds on the petrofiction conversation by considering critical questions such as the value of fiction in exploring our relationship with fossil fuel energy (past and future), the utility of the novel in this effort, and the limits of mimetic representation. As a group, these essays unpack Ghosh’s 1992 piece and his subsequent novels in interesting directions and bring in ideas from his 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement.

3 Excepting 1, 12, 14, and 15, each chapter revolves around the analysis, explication, or close reading of one or more fictional texts as their authors pose arguments about the effectiveness of the novel form and the restrictive nature of Ghosh’s narrow definition of the petrofiction genre. The settings span Africa, South America, South Asia, and Iran and are frequently brought into conversation with other fictional texts.

4 Every one of the essays in this superb collection contributes thoughtfully to the broadening scholarly discussion around creative oil literature. Each chapter stands alone as a study of a particular feature of this conversation, advancing arguments for the expected scholarly reading audience ; however, there are several accessible openings for non-scholars, including Maya Vinai’s interview with Benyamin, Indian author of Goat Days, in Chapter 14. Arguments are engaging, creative, and sufficiently supported with fascinating links to other writers including those from post-colonial, Marxist, feminist, cultural, and Indian Ocean theoretical studies. Several Oil Fictions authors have produced compelling essays that will be insightful beyond the energy humanities discipline into English literature fields. For example, in Chapter 6, Henry Obi Ajumeze offers a thought-provoking piece on My Life in the Burning Creeks which brings elements of scatology and the “power of odor” [2] into his reading of Ben Binebai’s stage play to argue that oil’s “distinctiveness finds expression in how tropes of waste and decay of crude oil matter are imagined and performed.” [3]

5 An underlying theme running through the essays is a call to expand the petrofiction category beyond texts which explicitly feature oil or oil-related cultural aspects in order to include historical stories of petrostructures which support oil, hence the anthology’s title, Oil Fictions. These stories reveal the oil industry’s deep reach into the economics, social life, and politics of extraction site peripheries.

6 In his insightful recontextualization of two Latin American oil novels, Scott Vries’“Oil Gets Everywhere : Critical Representations of the Petroleum Industry in Spanish American Literature” in Chapter 11 offers a two-pronged response to Amitav Ghosh and Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. The former limits petrofiction classification to those novels about the Oil Encounter, interpreted by Vries as contact “between Indigenous Arabic peoples and representatives of the US petroleum industry in the Middle East.” [4] The latter infamously dismisses Latin American novels written before the Latin American Literary Boom, likewise detracting future attention from “the voluminous corpus of Spanish American oil fictions” [5] written prior to 1960. Vries takes up two examples of these, Huastecaa (1939) by Mexican Gregorio López y Fuentes and Guachimanes (Watchmen, 1954) by Venezuelan Gabriel Bracho Montiel, to show how they represent tendencies in the lost subgenre of Spanish American oil fictions including criticism of exploration by foreign entities, novel forms of resistance and resolution to employment conflict, and ecological consequence from both. Vries’ detailed analysis is persuasive. Readers will come to understand that not only does there exist a fascinating subgenre to rediscover, but that various regions of the continent have produced narratives strikingly novel to their geographies.

7 In Chapter 7, collection co-editor Stacey Balkan juxtaposes George Orwell’s Burmese Days with Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace, demonstrating how the development of cheap nature existed long before oil extraction began in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Balkan traces the emergence of the timber economy–teak and later rubber plantations–and identifies a series of imperial projects which have morphed into today’s oil extractavist regime. The commodification of these early resources and the associated peasant labour formed the basis for the systems that would overtake the country in preparation for oil. These projects depended on the abstraction of the labour and the destruction of human, non-human, and more-than-human landscapes. The work was disappearing from sight. Balkan makes plain the principle of cheap nature and its function as a process of lifting agency, thereby changing humans and other entities into dead abstractions and rendering their work and their destruction invisible. [6]

8 For this reason, Balkan writes that while the text is usually seen as an empire critique, she reads the narrative as a precursor to our petroculture and, therefore, as an indication of the necessity of expanding the petrofiction genre to include fictions that are tied implicitly to oil. Balkan’s argument that The Glass Palace must be read as an oil fiction hinges on her observation of the “fluidity of the carbon economy in the ages of wood and oil.” [7] Integral to her thesis, The Glass Palace documents the development of cheap nature across a century of colonial-era imperial projects which lay the groundwork for the oil industry. Specifically, she unpacks the way “classificatory systems” [8] work patterns are developed and relations between foreign and Indigenous entities are formed.

9 The Glass Palace, argues Balkan, also functions as a critique to the liberal worldview Orwell’s Burmese Days represents when the two novels are read side by side. Balkan’s essay builds on her observation that, while labour and destruction is materially invisible to most oil consumers, it also remains absent from progressive public discourse around oil. In addition to the content of The Glass Palace qualifying as an oil fiction text, Balkan points out that the novel intervenes generically, challenging Ghosh’s position that the novel form is insufficient for the Oil Encounter based on his opinion that The Trench by Abdelrahman Munif ultimately fails to represent the Arabian Peninsula in terms other than a “multilingual, culturally polyphonic” [9] mass. Balkan finds instead that in his novel, The Glass Palace, Ghosh is able to successfully unseat “the individualist (and anthropocentric) pathologies of the modern novel […] with a rich polyphony of voices.” [10]

10 If the ubiquity of petroleum might ultimately qualify all modern fiction as petrofiction or oil fiction, then what distinguishes a member of this genre from another ? What must these novels reveal about petroculture in order to be counted meaningful to the study of energy humanities? Helen Kapstein in Chapter 4 approaches the question of categorizing oil narratives from an entirely different point of view from other essayists in this collection. Kapstein uses the term “petrofeminism” as a pathway for literary scholars and readers to know women’s lives as petrosubjects, “petrofeminism”, and links this to literary acts. [11] In the context of the Nigerian romance novels and love literature Kapstein studies, the focus of the protagonists’ struggles is not their victimization by the petrostructure, but rather the quotidian within it. Underscoring the argument is her hypothesis that if oil is indeed everywhere, particularly in Nigeria, the tensions and debates of oil politics “must invariably arise in the country’s fiction.” [12] According to Kapstein, while there are Nigerian literary novels which disrupt the Big Oil narrative, the romance novels follow female characters pursuing personal goals inside societies thoroughly entangled with the production, trade, and consumption of oil. [13]

11 Kapstein explains how quotidian progress and destruction are placed in equal measure in these texts, making women’s lives visible in terms of both reward and suffering. The productive nature of petrofeminist literature acts, as they relate to writing, is outlined in this quotation :

12

This particular strand of feminism—shaped by, reactive to, and corrective of a petroarchy–– suggests that romance and pleasure are as much oil relations as are dirt, violence, and degradation. Petrofeminism, in this way, highlights the constructive potentials of writing, love, and care in the service of various kinds of liberation ranging from the individual (pertaining to selfhood and sexual identity) to the epochal (pertaining to anthropocentric concerns like mobility and energy independence). [14]

13 Part of Kapstein’s essay focusses on acclaimed Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie, a love story that takes place in America and in oil-saturated Nigerian society which nevertheless rarely mentions oil explicitly. Yet, she observes that, when it does enter the conversation during a party, “[o]il as generative backdrop is so assumed that neither critics nor characters see it.” [15]

14 It is possible that using Ghosh’s original parameters for petrofiction would see texts such as Sin Is A Puppy Who Follows You Home by Balaraba Ramat Yakubu as outside the genre. However, Kapstein shows that these are highly connected to the oil landscape and exist in this particular form only because of oil. Implicit in Kapstein’s essay is that the manifestation of petrofeminism seems to depend on proximity to extraction and production, and therefore has the potential to be more productive in a Nigerian geography as opposed to net-consuming geographies of the West.

15 In addition to categorizing fiction according to the degree of thematic or explicit oil content, several essays within this collection interrogate the aesthetics of a text to determine how it contributes to the petroculture conversation regardless of content.

16 As Chapter 9 reminds readers, Ghosh’s experience writing his 1986 novel, The Circle of Reason, led him to his 1992 conclusions around the limits of the novel form. Ghosh himself draws this connection in Chapter 1, “Petrofiction Revisited”. At least three writers in Oil Fictions demonstrate through their readings that various aesthetics of novels can amplify their ability to make meaning in oil-storytelling. Speculative writing techniques are shown to uncover various invisible and/or unspoken aspects of the Oil Encounter or the petroleum industry more broadly. For example, Chapter 8, “Aestheticizing Absurd Extraction : Petro-Capitalism in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s ‘In Mussafah Grew People’” by collection co-editor Swaralipi Nandi, engages with the question of labour in an oil economy–one that Nandi asserts is absent from existing petrocultures discourse. For Nandi, understanding oil fictions includes taking “into account the material conditions of its production in the context of extractivist regimes that thrive on the dispossession of the poor and marginalized.” [16] She writes that, since Ghosh’s charge that a lack of oil presence in literature has made the resource and the extractive process invisible, petrofiction critics have sought to locate oil’s presence in historical texts and others which may not be immediately considered petrofiction. These attempts search primarily for the capitalist explorer trope, Nandi maintains, causing the labour aspect of the Oil Encounter (aside from a few exceptions she lists) to remain invisible. Through her detailed reading, she identifies in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s short story its important ability to render labor visible through absurdist aesthetics and to reveal the economic relationship as a replication of slavery.

17 In further response to Ghosh’s skepticism of the novel form for Oil Encounter writing, Nandi discusses the potential of Michael Lowy’s aesthetic concept, “critical irrealism”, [17] as it pertains to storytelling. Using the short story “In Mussafah Grew People” as her exemplar, Nandi explains that, despite their speculative nature, the modified pod-grown entities featured as characters –“barely distinguishable” [18] from human workers–provide a striking critique of the oil regime from the perspective of labor. Unnikrishnan’s narrative about harvesting labour places the worker in the centre of the story. By aligning her reading with critical irrealism as a mode beyond realist genres for interrogating labour issues in extractive industries, Nandi’s examination concludes that, through the use of absurdist aesthetics, Unnikrishnan exposes “the capitalistic fantasy of an inexhaustible expropriation that thrives on the incessant supply of an exploitable environment and disposable labor.” [19]

18 Nandi points out that even as the unbalanced nature of energy production systems are made more visible as the literature grows and the discourse expands, labour is seen from the consumerist point of view rather than from the human labourer. Energy labour is even written about in terms of slavery, but it is the system itself, the consumers dependence upon it and the machinery involved, that is the focus, “while [remaining] largely silent about human energy slaves”. [20] Nandi unpacks the metaphorical connection between the kafala system (one based in law and custom which recruits migrant workers under employer sponsorship conditions which span housing and employment conditions including the ability of migrants to change employers) and the trans-Atlantic slave trade to make her point clearer. [21]

19 Wendy W. Walters’s essay in Chapter 5, ‘“We Are Pipeline People’ : Nnedi Okorafor’s Ecocritical Speculations”, presents a reading of Okorafor’s short stories, “Spider the Artist” and “The Popular Mechanic”, highlighting how the author resists the common trope of a dystopic Niger Delta rural space. Rather, as Walters argues, these two speculative texts reveal that it is the intrusive Western oil companies that possess dystopic characteristics. For example, the narratives employ zombie pipeline guards and mechanical arms to replace human work appendages. By augmenting realist extraction scenarios with speculative conditions and subsequent resistance by the protagonists, Walters makes the case that these texts are uncommonly hopeful and future-looking oil fictions. She further suggests that, in writing oil fiction, the tropes of terrifying destruction can be resisted. Yet, Okorafor still critiques the system of extraction by revealing dangerous working condition key to the plot and making visible the materiality of pipelines. Walters shows how “Okorafor’s speculative fiction resists depicting absolute dystopia and yet marshals a complex critique of multinational oil corporation operating in the Niger Delta.” [22] Not only do the texts identify moments of ecological destruction and interference by the pipeline, but the social consequences inside families, such as alcoholism and domestic abuse, are presented. In this way, Walters claims that Okorafor creates “a local focus with a global accounting.” [23] Finally, Walter returns to the concept of dystopia and posits that it is contextually based on geography : for whom is running out of oil dystopic, and for whom does dystopia begin with the discovery of oil? [24]

20 In one of the Oil Fictions’ three essays which contemplate the unique impact of petro-production on women at the periphery, Sharae Deckard reads The Dark Bride and Love in the Kingdom of Oil in Chapter 3. Deckard explains what the texts’ themes and aesthetics reveal about the gendered oil relation since both novels interrogate gender relations during oil extraction activities. The Dark Bride, set in Colombia, features a group of female sex workers indirectly supporting the male labour of oil extraction and subsequent corporate profits. The oil transport labour of women in Love in the Kingdom of Oil is more explicitly connected to oil production and export, and in this novel, unlike many oil fictions, oil is made visible–“excessively legible,” [25] Deckard writes. Indeed, the entire fictional Middle Eastern petro-state setting is soaking in oil. Through these texts, Deckard examines the relationship between oil and social reproduction for which women are responsible. Social reproduction, which includes love, sex, and procreation, is shown as a gendered and unappreciated responsibility either unpaid or underpaid. Deckard’s analysis observes that the “oil-suffused household” of the patriarchal love “is neither a paradise of petrolic good life nor a domestic refuge from the toil of work” for the wives, “but rather an infernal nightmare.” [26] Deckard contrasts the petro-masculinity impacting women in The Dark Bride as “rooted in a sense of male virility linked to manual labour” [27] since here, it is the men performing the extraction work.

21 Deckard’s analysis of these two novels brings to mind Sheena Wilson’s writing elsewhere about petrofeminism, notwithstanding Wilson’s focus on the West. [28] Wilson explains that through oil production, western corporations claim to drive progress in women’s freedom while appropriating women’s autonomy and rejecting women’s petro-resistance, thereby rationalising oil imperialism. Wilson promotes a dismantling of petrostructures. Deckard’s work in this collection extends Wilson’s ideas productively because it has identified texts which counter the corporate rhetoric around women’s freedom demonstrating effective resistance within the petro-apparatus. While Wilson’s concept of petrofeminist may be where Deckard’s ideas appear to originate, by the end of the essay, her position seems more aligned with Chapter 4’s author, Helen Kapstein, who situates petrofeminism as (literary) acts of resistance inside the petrostructure.

22 In The Dark Bride, the sex workers join the male oil workers in acts of resistance against the oil company. Deckard observes that “[w] omen are not fetishized as victims”, despite being subjected to violence, “[i]nstead they are foregrounded as political actors : intelligent, resourceful, and capable of both spontaneous action and political organization.” [29] In her highlighting the women’s actions positively, Deckard indicates that feminist petro-resistance is not only possible but productive in the greater scheme of protecting women’s rights and autonomy in the face of the petro-regime. Whereas Wilson rejects the petro-apparatus entirely elsewhere, [30] Deckard characterizes these efforts within the economic, political, and social structures which employ and sustain their immediate needs as resistant. Deckard’s chapter aligns with the other superb essays in this collection in their pursuit to locate invisible pockets of people within varying distances from extraction sites.

23 The collection’s focus on the Global South travels a great distance to rectify what critics refer to as the flattening of the global oil experience. [31] Yet, there are confounding aspects of Northern work life which remain unexamined. In Chapter 15, “Testimonies from the Permian Basin”, Kristen Figgins, Rebecca Babcock, and Sheena Stief, unpack the economic and social consequences of frequent booms and busts in the Permian Basin across West Texas and New Mexico. Through a series of interviews, a meaningful “collection of sustained memories” [32] of families and communities living in places of uncertain job markets is presented. As in most of the other chapters, these micro-economies are viewed through a Marxist lens in which the workers–having frequently migrated from other parts of the country–become tools of those in power. The plight and vulnerability of front-line workers are juxtaposed against those in control of the resource (governments and corporations). These working men and women move with their families to where the work is. Those who stay long-term become familiar with the process of moving into other industries such as retail and service when the oil work lags.

24 For this reader, Chapter 15 raised questions around semi-permanent professional workers that fall between these two categories. My observations of professional engagement in my own part of the world, Alberta, Canada, have led me to conclude that the economic relationships between oil capital and oil work are more complicated than those with power and those without. In communities where resource extraction is broadly sustained across generations–despite the rise and fall of prices, variable supply, and inconstant government regulations– people study at universities, plan for careers in the industry, and build lives nearby. These workers are not those who have migrated from the East coast for temporary work, rather they are petroleum engineers, geologists, geophysicists, environmental lawyers, accountants, energy business analysts, and technologists who, through their complicity, make extraction their life’s work. These are men and women who have trained specifically for management positions in highly technical and specific fields and who generally draw professional and financial reward in exchange for their professional work commitment. It is this group of people who also face booms and busts and who contend with the criticism directed towards their industry, that are currently invisible to energy humanities scholars.

25 They are among the privileged, as Szeman describes in his “Afterword”, “wealthy, first-world city dwellers, for whom electricity and gasoline appear as if by magic, stripped of the narratives of extraction that have made it possible to stick iPhone chargers into their walls with little thought as to where the power comes from.” [33] Except they do know where the power comes from and they value highly the calculations, innovative processes, and management of resources required to bring energy about. These are the same people who weekend nearby in the magnificent Rocky Mountains biking, hiking, and bouldering. They are wealthy, but not situated in the most senior positions of the industry collecting the greatest profits and setting the course for the corporations on the grand scale. These professionals are neither the exploiters nor the exploited, but somewhere in between. Perhaps they are both.

26 While professionals at this level serve at the pleasure of the corporate budgets, they are not at risk of marginalization in the same way front-line workers are, which is perhaps why this category of employees are not examined more urgently in scholarly writing. Life circumstances do not force them to stay and support the extraction model, although they have consciously chosen to commit themselves to this business and now have too much to lose. Where is this relationship with modernity and more specifically, oil, recorded for examination?

27 Understanding why they stay, their complicity, 26 their expressions of internal resistance, their ambivalence, and the degree of cognitive dissonance that is at play, promises to be an interesting area for future examination in order to understand our petroculture more comprehensively. Literary production which distinguishes the multiple layers of oil workers will subvert the current, simplified industry portrait that suggests there are two sides in the extraction equation : those who benefit through consumption and those who suffer beneath extractive structures.

28 In “Petrofiction”, Ghosh called for more storytell- 27 ing from the Global South to which Oil Fictions has responded fiercely ; however, Ghosh also questions the absence of the “Great American Oil Novel”, [34] which invites investigation into invisible spaces in the North as well. [35]