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Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil
Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom
Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken. Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.
Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken. Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.
248 pages, Paperback
Published February 28, 2023
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April 11, 2023
this is an edited volume which critically examines the political and economic landscape of western North Dakota from a perspective that attends to how its moral aesthetics produce and uphold certain structures of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism. i have a chapter in here concerning the managed "aesthetics of police" during the DAPL blockade. includes details like the only firearm discharged at the camp was an officer shooting himself in the foot. it's relatively academic but also an outpouring of my thought concerning how attempts by protest movements to appear "nonviolent" can never win, and we should just give up the anxiety about looking nonviolent.
but i hadn't read or heard much about the arguments of the other chapters, despite knowing many of the contributors. at first i was a bit apprehensive about the project but eventually i found the book to be increasingly fascinating, as each of the scholars tries to grapple with how "the bakken" became a region defined by its exceptionality, when it isn't really that exceptional. i also appreciated the attention to aesthetics, particularly art, video, architecture, and banal public relations--there are a lot of pictures in this book! all that said, i did feel like the volume gave a bit of a 'surface reading' of the situation. you can sort of get the sense of a bunch of scholars whose primary fieldwork is not in north dakota just stopping by for a little bit. and not to make a simplistic argument about representation, but it's just kind of tough to read a collective critique of settler coloniality without Indigenous scholars. still, a helpful if somewhat niche book that could help scholars s
but i hadn't read or heard much about the arguments of the other chapters, despite knowing many of the contributors. at first i was a bit apprehensive about the project but eventually i found the book to be increasingly fascinating, as each of the scholars tries to grapple with how "the bakken" became a region defined by its exceptionality, when it isn't really that exceptional. i also appreciated the attention to aesthetics, particularly art, video, architecture, and banal public relations--there are a lot of pictures in this book! all that said, i did feel like the volume gave a bit of a 'surface reading' of the situation. you can sort of get the sense of a bunch of scholars whose primary fieldwork is not in north dakota just stopping by for a little bit. and not to make a simplistic argument about representation, but it's just kind of tough to read a collective critique of settler coloniality without Indigenous scholars. still, a helpful if somewhat niche book that could help scholars s
Displaying 1 of 1 review