This is not an oil novel: obstacles to reading petronarratives in high-energy cultures. Issue 3 (4th March 2021) - Barrios, Elizabeth
ABSTRACT: This article explores the conceptual habits that made it difficult for twentieth-century literary studies to take novels about oil extraction seriously. Focusing primarily on Ramón Díaz Sánchez's Mene (1936) from Venezuela, and Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt (1983), published in Lebanon, but ostensibly about Saudi Arabia, I argue that oil extractive novels present an aesthetic and political challenge to the sensibilities and spatial imaginaries of high-energy societies. By exploring the overlooked connections among petronarratives, this essay ultimately posits that we should read texts like Mene and Cities of Salt as part of a global archipelago of texts depicting sites with shared histories of social and environmental harm, which have accumulated into our current planetary ecological crisis. Such a reading involves resisting the impulse to reduce extractive literature to a single context because reckoning with the narratives that sustained and resisted our fossil-fuelled ways of life requires being less concerned with situating a text in its proper place, and more with articulating relations among the particular and planetary phenomena.