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Oil Culture

Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden

Abstract

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry, oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, the book composes the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The chapters examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with th ... More

Keywords: petroleum industry, oil culture, petrocapitalism, wartime propaganda, museum displays, environmental disaster, science fiction, films, photography

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780816689682
Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816689682.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Ross Barrett, editor
Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Penn State

Daniel Worden, editor

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I Oil’s Origins of Modernization

1 Whale Oil Culture, Consumerism, and Modern Conservation

Heidi Scott

2 The Wizard of Oil

Rochelle Raineri Zuck

3 Picturing a Crude Past

Ross Barrett

4 A Short History of Oil Cultures; or, The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance

Frederick Buell

Part II Oil’s Golden Age: Literature, Film, and Propaganda

5 Essential Driving and Vital Cars American Automobile Culture in World War II

Sarah Frohardt-Lane

6 Fossil-Fuel Futurity

Daniel Worden

7 “Liquid Modernity”

Hanna Musiol

8 From Isfahan to Ingolstadt

Georgiana Banita

Part III The Local and Global Territories of Oil

9 Aramco’s Frontier Story

Chad H. Parker

10 Oil Frontiers

Michael Watts

11 Petro-Magic-Realism Revisited

Jennifer Wenzel

12 Refined Politics

Matthew T. Huber

13 Gendering Oil

Sheena Wilson

Part IV Exhibiting Oil

14 Mixing Oil and Water

Dolly Jørgensen

15 Petroaesthetics and Landscape Photography

Catherine Zuromskis

16 Fossil, Fuel

Stephanie Lemenager

Part V The Future of and without Oil

17 Retrofutures and Petrofutures

Gerry Canavan

18 Crude Aesthetics

Imre Szeman

19 Oil and Dust

Melanie Doherty

20 Imagining Angels on the Gulf

Ruth Salvaggio

End Matter

Contributors

Index