Stephanie LeMenager
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199899425
- eISBN:
- 9780199347186
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199899425.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still ...
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This book is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels, and memoirs. The book’s unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory, and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil’s omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and aspirin tablets. The book makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, nonhuman lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petroculture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American century. LeMenager’s kaleidoscopic approach to petroculture will draw in readers from an array of disciplines.Less
This book is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels, and memoirs. The book’s unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory, and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil’s omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and aspirin tablets. The book makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, nonhuman lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petroculture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American century. LeMenager’s kaleidoscopic approach to petroculture will draw in readers from an array of disciplines.
Sheena Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816689682
- eISBN:
- 9781452949314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816689682.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
This chapter examines the ways that contemporary commercial photography uses constructs of femininity to promote the continued expansion of domestic oil industries, delegitimize women’s anti-oil ...
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This chapter examines the ways that contemporary commercial photography uses constructs of femininity to promote the continued expansion of domestic oil industries, delegitimize women’s anti-oil activism, and derail post-Deepwater protests against offshore drilling. Focusing on contemporary women’s environmental activism and a range of industry advertising and press imagery, it illuminates the relationship between human rights, gender, racial equality and the petro-discourses that are newly oriented around ecology. It also considers how women’s relationship to oil, to the environment, and to the petrocultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the West is portrayed in the mainstream media in a limited number of largely superficial ways: first, through embedded feminism and women’s rights as they intersect with human and ethnocultural rights; second, through consumerism; and third, through the recuperation of the female body as a canvas on which to spectacularize politics—largely with explicit consumer aims.Less
This chapter examines the ways that contemporary commercial photography uses constructs of femininity to promote the continued expansion of domestic oil industries, delegitimize women’s anti-oil activism, and derail post-Deepwater protests against offshore drilling. Focusing on contemporary women’s environmental activism and a range of industry advertising and press imagery, it illuminates the relationship between human rights, gender, racial equality and the petro-discourses that are newly oriented around ecology. It also considers how women’s relationship to oil, to the environment, and to the petrocultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the West is portrayed in the mainstream media in a limited number of largely superficial ways: first, through embedded feminism and women’s rights as they intersect with human and ethnocultural rights; second, through consumerism; and third, through the recuperation of the female body as a canvas on which to spectacularize politics—largely with explicit consumer aims.
Catherine Zuromskis
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816689682
- eISBN:
- 9781452949314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816689682.003.0015
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
This chapter examines two significant photographic exhibitions—the 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and ...
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This chapter examines two significant photographic exhibitions—the 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, and a 2009 traveling exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of oil landscapes, entitled Burtynsky: Oil. It employs the two exhibitions to explore the quiet resonances of unease and anxiety that structure contemporary landscape photographers’ visions of petromodernity. It considers what landscape photography does to frame both the oil industry and the pervasive petroculture it supports on both a political and an affective level. It also discusses landscape photography in relation to petro-postmodernity and petroaesthetics. It argues that both New Topographics and Burtynsky’s Oil offer insight into the “structures of feeling” that define life in the West in the age of oil.Less
This chapter examines two significant photographic exhibitions—the 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, and a 2009 traveling exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of oil landscapes, entitled Burtynsky: Oil. It employs the two exhibitions to explore the quiet resonances of unease and anxiety that structure contemporary landscape photographers’ visions of petromodernity. It considers what landscape photography does to frame both the oil industry and the pervasive petroculture it supports on both a political and an affective level. It also discusses landscape photography in relation to petro-postmodernity and petroaesthetics. It argues that both New Topographics and Burtynsky’s Oil offer insight into the “structures of feeling” that define life in the West in the age of oil.
