Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

by Stephanie LeMenager

Living 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 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. 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.

Genres: History, Cultural Studies

280 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2013

Reviews

[kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn this was nuts

[Maura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent exploration of America’s love affair with petroleum and the deep implications of our continued use. I could have done with a closer look at extraction in places other than California and Texas, but she successfully created a narrative of how place and specific environments are impacted by oil while achieving her larger goal of exploring the cultural manifestations and complications of living oil. Would recommend even for the non-academic interested in mining, environmentalism, or petroculture.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot of really good information in here, and I think that the analysis, for the most part, is really solid. I did at times want LeMenager to make her framework of the analysis more clear (e.g. don't call it North American and focus just on US/Canada without problematizing why the analysis needs to focus on those countries, unpack "commodity regionalism" and how it looks like in different parts of the US, etc.).

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and horrifying.