On Petrocultures

Globalization, Culture, and Energy

Imre Szeman

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781946684882
  9781946684875
• eBook ISBN:
  9781946684899
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy
• Index: Biological Sciences

On Petrocultures brings together key essays by Imre Szeman, a leading scholar in the field of energy humanities and a critical voice in debates about globalization and neoliberalism. Szeman's most important and influential essays, in dialogue with exciting new pieces written for the book, investigate ever-evolving circuits of power in the contemporary world, as manifested in struggles over space and belonging, redefinitions of work and individual autonomy, and the deep links between energy use and climate change.

These essays explore life lived in the twenty-first century by examining critically the vocabulary through which capitalism makes sense of itself, focusing on concepts like the nation, globalization, neoliberalism, creativity, and entrepreneurship. At the heart of the volume is the concept of "petrocultures," which demands that we understand a fundamental fact of modern life: we are shaped by and through fossil fuels. Szeman argues that we cannot take steps to address global warming without fundamentally changing the social, cultural, and political norms and expectations developed in conjunction with the energy riches of the past century. On Petrocultures maps the significant challenge of our dependence on fossil fuels and probes ways we might begin to leave petrocultures behind.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Petrocultures
• 1. Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization
• 2. Culture and Globalization, or, The Humanities in Ruins
• 3. Globalization, Postmodernism, and Literary Criticism
• 4. System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster
• 5. Neoliberals Dressed in Black, or, the Traffic in Creativity
• 6. The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files
• 7. Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries
• 8. How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures
• 9. Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense
• 10. Conjectures on World Energy Literature
• 11. Pipelines and Territories: On Energy and Environmental Futures in Canada
• 12. On the Politics of Region
• References
• Sources and Permissions
• Index