In April this year I visited the University of Oregon, Eugene, which is a global pioneer in cross-disciplinary eco-critical studies. While I was there I had an interesting meeting with Stephanie Le Menager, the author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century – a fascinating study of the role of oil in the contemporary American imagination.
I learnt from Stephanie, to my very great surprise, that a review I had written in 1992 – Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel – has become a seminal text in a field that is expanding rapidly in the US and Canada: Petroculture Studies (as this article explains, the term is adapted from the title of my piece).
‘Petrofiction’ is actually a review of the Jordanian-Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt which I describe as a ‘monumental five-part cycle of novels dealing with the history of oil.’ The review was published in The New Republic (2 March 1992: 29-33) and is also included in my essay collections Incendiary Circumstances (USA) and The Imam and the Indian (India).
I had no idea that Petrofiction had had this catalytic effect. I later wrote to Prof. Alessandro Vescovi (of the Università degli Studi di Milano) who very kindly curates the bibliography on my website, to ask whether some Petroculture studies might be included in the bibliography. A few weeks later he sent me an update prefaced by these words:
I had not included petrofiction studies in the periodical updates as I had not fully grasped how the whole field is indeed a spin-off of your review of Munif’s novels. Almost all of the papers in this short bibliography mention “Oil Encounter” as a starting point, though it is now more than 20 years since its publication; however it seems that the discipline has grown, and so has oil literature. There is even a scholar (Hitchcock) who maintains that the time has come for the discipline to move beyond the tracks laid down by “Oil Encounter” in 1992. Most of these essays have been produced in America, but due to my own linguistic limitations, I could not extend the search to Arabic sources, which might yield interesting results.
This is the material I have found in a few data bases including the British Library, The Library of Congress, Google Scholar, Google Books, Jstor, MLA Bibliography, Abell, Cambridge Univ. Bibliographic centre, with keywords such as Petrofiction, Oil Culture, Oil AND novel. Unfortunately I have not had the time to go through the texts as they would deserve.
Petrofiction bibliography
Aghoghovwia, Philip Onoriode. 2013. Coastlines and Littoral Zones in South African Ecocritical Writing Volume 6 of Alternation / Special edition: CSSALL.
Alissa, Reem. 2013. “The Oil Town of Ahmadi since 1946: From Colonial Town to Nostalgic City.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33 (1):41-58.
Alleva, Richard. 2008. “Thicker Than Oil: There Will Be Blood.” Commonweal 135 (134:3):19-20.
Atkinson, Ted. 2013. “‘Blood Petroleum: True Blood, the BP Oil Spill, and Fictions of Energy/Culture.” Journal of American Studies 47 (1):213-229.
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden. 2012. “Oil Culture: Guest Editors’ Introduction.” Journal of American Studies 46 (02):269-272.
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden, eds. 2014. Oil Culture: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Beckman, Ericka. 2012. “An Oil Well Named Macondo: Latin American Literature in the Time of Global Capital.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 127 (1):145-151.
Breeze, Ruth. 2012. “Legitimation in Corporate Discourse: Oil Corporations after Deepwater Horizon.” Discourse & Society: An International Journal for the Study of Discourse and Communication in Their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts 23 (1):3-18.
Buell, Frederick. 2012. “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2):273-293.
Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. 2006. “Of Freedom and Oil: Nation, Globalization, and Civil Liberties in the Writing of Ken Saro-Wiwa.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 22:293-308.
Damluji, Mona. 2013. “The Oil City in Focus: The Cinematic Spaces of Abadan in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33 (1):75-88.
Fuccaro, Nelida. 2013. “Shaping the Urban Life of Oil in Bahrain: Consumerism, Leisure, and Public Communication in Manama and in the Oil Camps, 1932-1960s.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33 (1):59-74.
Hitchcock, Peter. 2010. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 69 (1):81-97.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2012. “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!” American Literary History 24 (1):59-86.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lyons, Laura E. 2011. “‘I’d Like My Life Back’: Corporate Personhood and the BP Oil Disaster.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34 (1):96-107.
Macdonald, Graeme. 2012. “Oil and World Literature.” American Book Review 33 (3):7-31.
McLarney, Ellen. 2009. ““Empire of the Machine”: Oil in the Arabic Novel.” boundary 2 36 (2):177-198.
McMurry, Andrew. 2012. “Framing Emerson’s ‘Farming’: Climate Change, Peak Oil, and the Rhetoric of Food Security in the Twenty-First Century.” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (3):548-566.
Okuyade, Ogaga. 2011. “Rethinking Militancy and Environmental Justice: The Politics of Oil and Violence in Nigerian Popular Music.” Africa Today 58 (1):78-101.
Ryan, Terre. 2010. “Creation Stories: Myth, Oil, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Journal of Ecocriticism 2 (1):81-86.
Schlote, Christiane. 2013. “Writing Dubai: Indian labour migrants and taxi topographies.” South Asian Diaspora (ahead-of-print):1-14.
Szeman, Imre. 2012. “Introduction to Focus: Petrofictions.” American Book Review 33 (3):3.
Szeman, Imre. 2013. “How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 47 (3):145-168.
Walonen, Michael K. 2012. ““The Black and Cruel Demon” and Its Transformations of Space: Toward a Comparative Study of the World Literature of Oil and Place.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 14 (1):56-78.
Weine, Stevan. 2007. “Blood Not Oil: Narrating Social Trauma in Springsteen’s Song-Stories.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 9 (1):37-46.
Worden, Daniel. 2012. “Fossil-Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant.” Journal of American Studies 46 (02):441-460.
Xinos, Ilana. 2006. “Petro-Capitalism, Petrofiction, and Islamic Discourse: The Formation of an Imagined Community in Cities of Salt.” Arab Studies Quarterly 28 (1):1-12.
Zabus, Chantal. 2001. “Ken Saro-Wiwa: Oil Boom, Oil Doom.” Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 23-24:1-12.
I am very grateful to Prof Vescovi for the work he has put into this.