Pervasive petrocultures: histories, ideas and practices of fossil fuels

Articles

Pervasive extractivism: Petroculture and sedimented histories in Sandrine Bessora’s Petroleum

The University of Southampton
g.champion[at]soton.ac.uk
@GiuliaChampion


The aim of this paper is twofold, first to explore how Sandrine Bessora’s novel Petroleum (2004) engages with the Medea intertext, and thus inserting itself in a specific literary filiation, addresses the writing of history. Second, how, through the merging of the Medea myth with the Mami Wata…

The ubiquity of Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands as a case of banal petroculture

Utrecht University/ Stellenbosch University
g.buelens[at]uu.nl


In 1995 Michael Billig introduced the term ‘banal nationalism’ to refer to those representations and reproductions of the nation which are as ubiquitous as they tend to go unnoticed. I try to link this concept to ‘petroculture’ since that notion too refers to practices that are so pervasive in…

Oceanic irrealism. Danish petrofiction below the surface

Postdoctoral researcher, University of Southern Denmark
karlemil[at]sdu.dk


This article ventures seaward to examine how two contemporary Danish novels paradoxically uses irrealist features to make visible the existent opacity and mythology of oil. Respectively, the novel På ryggen af en tyr (2014; On the Back of a Bull) by Kristina Stoltz employs…