Bondré, Natasha (2020) Reading ‘Emperor Oil’ in the expanded Caribbean : petroleum, ecology and Caribbean literature in the twentieth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis examines and analyses selected literatures from the region that Peter Hulme has called the ‘expanded Caribbean’. This term, it is worth clarifying, theoretically encompasses the island archipelago and South American rim lands, connecting them through their history of shared lived experiences as part of the growth of the modern/colonial capitalist world economy. The thesis uses the novel and short story as critical vehicles to consider the ways in which Caribbean writers register and react to the impact of petro-capitalism across the region. I borrow Hulme’s term because it emphasises the unity-in-diversity of experiences across the colonial Caribbean, but also the contemporary infiltration of a far-reaching oil-culture across the islands and rim lands. I utilise the work of eco-critics such as Jason W. Moore to highlight the fact that the region has been used as series of commodity frontiers throughout its history, the most notable of these being sugar. However, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the nations of the expanded Caribbean have experienced a new set of vast changes thanks to the hegemony of oil-capitalism. The thesis examines the regionally specific sociocultural changes wrought by petroleum’s dominance in the expanded Caribbean, but also the ways in which these changes are part of a larger global economy, a contemporary capitalist world-system which is powered by the oil commodity and is, as such, a specifically petro-capitalist system. Moreover, as Moore points out, the capitalist world-system is, and (throughout all its various historical permutations, industrial, financial, etc.) has always in fact been a ‘world-ecology’. With this premise in mind, the thesis examines various co-optations of the Caribbean’s human and extra-human natures in service to (petro) capital accumulation. This co-optation appears in various guises within the selected literatures, from the exploitation of labour power and natural landscapes on the frontiers of oil extraction; the merging of oil, ethnicity, and politics; the specifically gendered and racialised exploitation that is engendered by the arrival and hegemony of oil corporations working alongside local governments; the transformation of lifeways through objects such as the automobile and the aeroplane. Each author’s response to the presence of petro-capitalism in the region varies. Each work examined either resists, eludes, embraces, or critiques the nature of the global oil-economy, and its fallout in the expanded Caribbean, in terms of its impacts on the region’s ecology, economics, politics and culture. These different literary registrations of petro-capitalism and petroculture are essential because they display a profound awareness of (petro-) capitalism as an ecological regime, but also because they are part of a global literary network of petrofiction, albeit from a region that has been relatively understudied in the energy humanities. I connect various strands of theory to these texts and utilise a tripartite disciplinary framework (of world-literature, eco-criticism, and oil-studies) to illustrate two facts – the first, I hope, reveals the importance of the second. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates the varied and profound consequences of petro-capitalism’s infiltration into Caribbean life. In its very demonstration of this fact lies the second one; the thesis strives to act as a clarion call to conjoin Caribbean literature to petrocultural work. It is a small contribution to the emerging body of literary scholarship which has begun to analyse Caribbean petrofiction within the wider field of the energy humanities.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Petroleum industry and trade -- Caribbean Area, Caribbean fiction -- History and criticism, Caribbean literature -- History and criticism, Caribbean Area -- Civilization
Official Date:	December 2020
Dates:	Date Event December 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Niblett, Michael ; Medeiros, Paulo de, 1958-
Sponsors:	University of Warwick. Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	302 leaves
Language:	eng

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