This special issue advances the first comprehensive account of “oil culture,” the broad field of cultural representations and symbolic forms that have taken shape around the fugacious material of oil in the 150 years since the inception of the US petroleum industry. Exploring the cultural life of oil from a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays in this special issue seek to elucidate the complex role that imaginative representations have played in establishing and contesting oil's status as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social and political life in the United States and beyond. By addressing the rise of oil as a cultural problem, this issue aims to fill a significant gap in oil scholarship and to intervene in what has become an epochal and highly charged moment in the history of petro-capitalism.

In opposition to energy historian Vaclav Smil, who argues that “timeless literature … show[s] no correlation with advances in energy consumption,” this essay makes the general claim that energy history is significantly entwined with cultural history. Energy history is in fact entwined with changing cultural conceptualizations and representations of psyche, body, society, and environment; it is correlated not just with changing material cultures, but with symbolic cultures as well. To see this, the essay argues, one must conceptualize energy history in terms of a succession of energy systems – systems that are constituted by sociocultural, economic, environmental, and technological relationships. The essay's specific argument then traces the effects on symbolic culture, especially literature, of the nineteenth – and twentieth-century shift from coal capitalism to oil–electric capitalism. It starts by looking at the features of early oil extraction culture, from Drake's 1859 oil strike in Titusville, Pennsylvania to Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and examines how oil–electric capitalism develops and defines itself culturally against the previous era of coal capitalism. Then the essay considers how the consolidation of the oil–electric capitalist system is significantly related to the emergence of modernist culture, affecting the production of both popular culture and high art. By the end of the twentieth century, a new phase in oil–electric capitalism emerges with the expansion of the postwar petrochemical industry, the dramatic expansion of environmental crisis discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and the return of peak-oil discourse to the mainstream in the last decade. The essay examines how the material features of oil, as well as its dominant uses as luminant, motor fuel, lubricant, and eventually petrochemical feedstock, take on cultural importance. Exemplifying both the cultural innovations and reinventions of oil capitalism from the extraction era to the consolidation era and the post-World War II period, the essay focusses throughout on the two recurring motifs, exuberance and catastrophe, as they play out in a wide range of literary texts and popular enthusiasms.

Oil is often thought of as a sole commodity with singular powers to shape geopolitics, economic development, and environmental change. Yet the complex hydrocarbon assemblage of crude oil is only commodified through the refining process, which produces a multiplicity of products (e.g. gasoline, heating oil, petrochemicals). In this paper, I argue that petroleum products provide the supplementary materiality for a neoliberal cultural politics of “life.” In the first section, drawing from Gramsci and Foucault, I argue that the popular basis of neoliberal hegemony is rooted in a cultural politics of “entrepreneurial life” that accompanied increasing suburbanization, single-family homeownership and widespread automobility in the post-World War II United States. By the 1970s, masses of white suburban homeowners buttressed the “rightward turn” in American politics based around an “ideology of hostile privatism” and the demonization of taxes and wealth redistribution. In the next section, I suggest that this geography of life is rooted in the history of refineries and their search for multiple marketable outlets for petroleum by-products. Increasingly, the petroleum industry sought to actively remind the public that their lives were saturated with petroleum products. In the last section, I examine a film produced by the American Petroleum Institute titled Fuel-Less, a parody of the film Clueless. In the film, the main character, Crystal, is forced to discover what her life would be like without petroleum products. Crystal is taken to an oil well and refinery to learn about how crude oil becomes the multiple products she uses in her life. As she learns to appreciate oil, she develops a neoliberal form of environmental responsibility focussed upon volunteerist actions like recycling. The overall lesson is both the unavoidability of oil in everyday life and that privatized actors (consumers and capital) can all “pitch in” to create a sustainable future.

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an “oil wizard” reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of “practical spiritualism” and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern “scientific” oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.

World War II, some scholars have argued, interrupted Americans’ “love affair” with the automobile. According to this school of thought, gasoline rationing temporarily curtailed car driving and suspended car culture before both surged in the postwar era. This essay argues that World War II strengthened, rather than interrupted, Americans’ attachment to the automobile and solidified driving as a fundamental part of American culture. Ration boards distinguished between “essential” and “nonessential” driving and justified gasoline rationing as the only method to preserve civilian driving when supplies of gasoline were low. Thus at the same time as government and private industry were encouraging Americans to limit their driving, they were sending a strong message that Americans needed to drive and that foregoing driving whenever one wanted was a true, if temporary, hardship. Advertisements and government propaganda conflated car ownership with citizenship and portrayed driving as integral to the American way of life. But this mode of citizenship was not available to all: posters, pamphlets, and advertisements portrayed the American driver almost exclusively as white and most often as male. Such depictions implied that the mobility and independence that driving afforded were the sole domain of white American men.

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

It is no secret that natural history museums strive to be archives of life, a common task grown more fraught in recent decades because of the crisis of biodiversity, the extinction of roughly 60,000 species per year. “Bio-informatics” has been a buzzword in the natural history literature of the twenty-first century, which recommends the digitization of museum collections such that global information sharing can keep scientists up to date about species loss. Some curators resent the emphasis upon information technology as the key to the continuing relevance of their collections, arguing, for instance, that “museums are the cornerstone of an object-oriented approach to the natural world.” The question of what durability means for natural history, and by extension for both “nature” and “history,” breaks around what counts as most lifelike: information or object, technology or bone. Los Angeles is a rich setting for the consideration of these questions, both because it is the world capital of the entertainment industry and because it hosts the world's largest archive of Pleistocene fossils, preserved in the asphaltum sinks that formed atop the Salt Lake Oil Field, itself the largest urban oil reserve. What petroleum means to evolving definitions of life, and thus to nature and history, has long been on display at the La Brea tar pits. What is not on display, namely micro-organisms grown up in the region's petroleum sludge, may be the saviors of our current geologic epoch and key to the renewal of the tired natural history concept.

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? I provide an answer to this question by examining the narrative and aesthetic choices through which the problem of oil is framed in three recent “feature” documentaries: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh's H2Oil (2009). My aim is to understand not only the specific politics enacted through the formal and aesthetic choices made in each film, but to map out what these documentaries tell us about the social life of oil today, and the capacity for films such as these to meaningfully intervene in the looming consequences of our dependence on oil. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, by offering readings of the discursive, narrative and aesthetic strategies of these documentaries, I draw out the ways in which each comes to understand the problem of oil. In the second part, I identify the key insights that these films offer regarding the specific social contradictions and political blockages that emerge from their attempt to name and understand oil. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the insights these films provide for addressing the antinomies that define and separate the anticapitalist and environmental movements.

Giant is a sprawling narrative, centered around the Benedict family, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jett Rink, a nouveau riche oilman. Originally serialized in Ladies' Home Journal in 1952, subsequently published as a novel, then adapted into George Stevens's 1956 film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is a text that dramatizes the domestication and naturalization of the oil industry in the postwar United States while endorsing a multiracial vision of Texas. This essay explores how Giant ultimately arrives at nationalistic pluralism after representing the radical changes brought about by the modern oil industry in the US, particularly the erosion of traditional class divisions as Jett Rink's oil wealth exceeds the Benedict's ranching wealth. The subsumption of oil into liberal pluralism marks what this essay names “fossil-fuel futurity,” an ideological configuration in which normative life is produced through the commodities and modes of transportation made available by fossil-fuel culture. The essay then puts Giant into a broader context of narratives about oil in the postwar US, especially the television series Dallas (1978–91) and the film There Will Be Blood (2007). In all three texts, oil culture becomes postwar US culture, saturating aesthetic, affective, and family relations. The challenge for us, then, is to imagine a mode of futurity that does not replicate the ideological valences of “fossil-fuel futurity.”

On 26 June 2010, the brand new Gulf of Mexico exhibit at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa opened devoid of life. The tanks were purposefully left empty, rather than showing the vibrant aquatic life of the Gulf, to highlight the oil spill associated with BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling incident earlier in 2010. According to the museum's press release, the museum wanted