Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American CenturyLiving Oil 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, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. 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. |
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accessed December aesthetic American Angeles Angeles’s archive Bayou beach blog body BP blowout Brea Brite California climate change CLUI’s coastal corporate critical culture drilling Earth Day ecological Energy Museum environment environmental environmentalists exhibit feeling fiction film Fort McMurray fossil fuel fracking future genre global Gulf Coast Habila historian Houston human Hurricane Katrina Ibid images imagine infrastructure Katrina labor Lawrence Buell living Lolita Los Angeles material means modern narrative natural history Niger Delta novel ocean offers Offshore ofthe oil industry Oil on Water Oil Sands oil spill oil’s Park peak oil petroleum photographs pits plot poem political potential production recognize refinery region resource rigs River road road novel Santa Barbara spill smog social southern space story Szeman tankers tar pits tar sands technologies Texas tion Tough Oil toxic twentieth century United University Press Ventura Ventura County writes York