Introduction to Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media<\/h1>\nEmily Roehl
\nRachel Webb Jekanowski <\/div>\n\nThe production of oil is imbricated in financial and socio-political systems as well as ways of mediating the worlds in which we live. Like infrastructures used to transport fuel, audio-visual media and other forms of cultural production (museums, poetry, film, visual art) can serve as conduits for ideas about energy, identity, relationships to the nonhuman world, and history. This special issue of Imaginations on \u201cCritical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media\u201d explores how media has been used to examine petroleum\u2019s place within Canadian and American cultural landscapes as well as oil\u2019s attendant socio-political and economic structures. Given our location on occupied Indigenous territories where we work as researchers and educators, we assert that energy developments are always already implicated within histories of white settlement in North America. Drawing on literary and film studies, energy humanities scholarship, critical museum studies, and a variety of creative and analytical research methods, the contributors to this issue theorize contemporary and historical practices of corporate petro-media alongside creative interventions to trace the interlacing of oil, media, and settler colonialism.<\/div>\nLa production de p\u00e9trole est imbriqu\u00e9e dans les syst\u00e8mes financiers et sociopolitiques ainsi que dans les modes de m\u00e9diation des milieux dans lesquels nous vivons. \u00c0 l’instar des infrastructures utilis\u00e9es pour transporter le carburant, les m\u00e9dias audiovisuels et d’autres formes de production culturelle (mus\u00e9es, po\u00e9sie, films, arts visuels) peuvent servir de vecteurs d’id\u00e9es sur l’\u00e9nergie, l’identit\u00e9, les relations avec le monde non humain et l’histoire. Ce num\u00e9ro sp\u00e9cial d\u2019Imaginations sur \u201cLes engagements critiques et cr\u00e9atifs avec les p\u00e9tro-m\u00e9dia\u201d explore certaines des fa\u00e7ons dont les m\u00e9dias ont \u00e9t\u00e9 utilis\u00e9s pour examiner la place du p\u00e9trole dans les paysages culturels canadiens et am\u00e9ricains, ainsi que les structures socio-politiques et \u00e9conomiques qui y sont associ\u00e9es. \u00c9tant donn\u00e9 que nous nous trouvons sur des territoires autochtones occup\u00e9s o\u00f9 nous travaillons comme chercheurs et \u00e9ducateurs, nous affirmons que les d\u00e9veloppements \u00e9nerg\u00e9tiques sont toujours d\u00e9j\u00e0 impliqu\u00e9s dans l\u2019histoire de la colonisation blanche en Am\u00e9rique du Nord. En s’appuyant sur des \u00e9tudes litt\u00e9raires et cin\u00e9matographiques, sur les sciences humaines de l’\u00e9nergie, sur des \u00e9tudes mus\u00e9ales critiques et sur une vari\u00e9t\u00e9 de m\u00e9thodes de recherche cr\u00e9atives et analytiques, les contributeurs de ce num\u00e9ro th\u00e9orisent les pratiques contemporaines et historiques des entreprises p\u00e9tro-m\u00e9diatiques et les interventions cr\u00e9atives afin de retracer l’entrelacement du p\u00e9trole, des m\u00e9dias et du colonialisme de peuplement.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\nO<\/span>il and its infrastructures extend throughout the cultural and socio-political worlds in which we live. From the sacrifice zones of fossil fuel production to the toxic sheen of industrial spills, fossil fuels are at once world-creating and world-destroying. Oil mediates the worlds around us. Like infrastructures used to transport fuel, audio-visual media and other forms of cultural production (galleries, museums, poetry, film, visual art) can serve as conduits for ideas about energy, identity, relationships to the nonhuman world, and history. This special issue of Imaginations<\/em> on \u201cCritical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media\u201d explores how textual and audio-visual media have been used to examine petroleum\u2019s place within Canadian and American cultural landscapes and oil\u2019s attendant socio-political and economic structures. Contributors in this issue employ conventional humanities scholarship and creative approaches to the materiality and histories of oil both to trace energy histories and to explore the visual and literary arts as tools of scholarly inquiry.<\/p>\nBuilding on Imaginations\u2019<\/em> long-standing engagement with petrocultures scholarship, including Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis\u2019s 2012 special issue \u201cSighting Oil,\u201d the authors included herein approach petroleum as a form of mediation as well as a resource mediated across cultural forms. Writing from within North America\u2014where we live and work across diverse Indigenous traditional territories\u2014many of the contributors foreground how settler colonialism frames petro-cultural production and social imaginaries as one such manifestation of \u201cextractivism\u201d (Gomez-Barris 2017; Szeman and Wenzel 2021). The seed for this issue sprouted from a panel at the 2019 Biannual Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Conference called \u201cMediating Power: Indigenous, Settler, and Corporate Petro-Media,\u201d held at UC Davis. Like the participants in the panel, the artists and scholars in this issue of Imaginations<\/em> take up different facets of petromedia to examine the complex entanglements of cultural production, settler colonialism, and petroleum extraction. Critically, these contributions foreground visual media in their analyses, featuring original videos, photographs, film stills, and documentation of exhibitions. However, not all institutions and practices are equally implicated in oil. Part of our aim with this issue is to think through how artists, writers, and practitioners address fossil fuels on different scales and with differing impacts on culture and society. In holding these tensions, we acknowledge that scholarly analyses of settler cultural institutions like those herein nevertheless benefit from the colonial extractive systems they seek to critique.<\/p>\nIn the elapsing years between the ASLE panel and the issue\u2019s publication, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic radically destabilized the ways researchers and artists can undertake their work. Yet in the early months of the pandemic, personal and professional losses gave rise to calls to radically reimagine how we work, imagine the global economy, and structure societies. It is within this context that we, as guest editors, sought to reframe our expectations of academic scholarship by asking contributors to produce shorter pieces and encouraging formal and conceptual experimentation. This resulting issue has also been undertaken almost entirely during the pandemic, an event that continues to lay bare the structural inequalities inherent to Canadian and American energy systems and society. Moreover, most of the contributors are themselves in the early stages of their careers as scholars and creative practitioners. We would like to acknowledge their hard work, undertaken between heavy teaching loads, Ph.D.\u00a0defenses, and job applications. We are also grateful to Gwladys Bertin for her scrupulous translations.<\/p>\n
We are particularly excited to share this work digitally with Imaginations<\/em> readers as part of our shared commitment to imagining (no pun intended) more equitable and less carbon-intensive forms of scholarly publishing (Pasek 2020). As energy humanities scholars, we are critically aware of how our research practices\u2014from flying to archives and field sites to the resource-intensive production process for print publications\u2014are entangled in high-carbon forms of transportation and labour. While contributing a small percentage of global carbon emissions, the carbon-intensive nature of academic work nevertheless contributes to conditions creating the climate crisis. Our decision to publish with an open-access, digital journal is part of the praxis this issue seeks to explore: how the methods and forms of petrocultural research inform the histories, infrastructures, and aesthetics of oil we seek to trace. Digital publications have their own material and energy requirements, of course\u2014the work of this special issue has relied on dispersed servers, devices, grids, and the resources required to run them. Despite these trade-offs, there remain significant material, ethical, and political considerations at play in doing lower-carbon publishing and publishing without paywalls.<\/p>\nInterweaving the Creative and the Critical<\/h2>\n
T<\/span>he organization of this issue is a practice in playfulness. We invite readers to tack between the academic essays and creative submissions, which adhere to their own rhymes of analysis, speculation, and introspection. The issue shifts from literary analysis (Karpinski, Unrau), poetry zines (George Bagdanov), and speculative histories (Vargas) to investigations of archival suppression (McCurdy) and critiques of museum practice (Sharp). Artistic interventions (Borsa and Beer, Roehl) bookend the issue. By ordering the pieces in this way, interweaving distinct approaches to oil, art, and knowledge, we demonstrate the expansiveness of petromedia scholarship and art-making while highlighting the importance of local interventions.<\/p>\nThe authors and creators in this special issue locate oil that is both present and absent, hyper-visible and invisibilized. Some contributors consider how the modern oil industry influences which cultural products are and are not produced. Camille-Mary Sharp analyses the Canadian Museum of History\u2019s newest permanent exhibition, the oil-sponsored The Canadian History Hall (2017), while Patrick McCurdy excavates the CBC docudrama The Tar Sands<\/em> (1977), a film banned after a legal dispute for its portrayal of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed\u2019s dealings with Syncrude. Many of the contributors use speculative approaches to this slippery substance, as in Elia Vargas\u2019 \u201cExcerpts of the Tome of Light,\u201d which imagines scenes from the site of the first oil discovery in Western Pennsylvania, or Melanie Unrau\u2019s imaginary comic strip encounter between S.C. Ells, a tar sands \u201cfounding father,\u201d and his legacy, a \u201cpetromodern dystopia\u201d of doomed waterfowl in Alberta\u2019s tailings ponds.<\/p>\nOther contributors experiment at the boundaries of poetic analysis and form, as in Max Karpinski\u2019s reading of Lesley Battler\u2019s Endangered Hydrocarbons<\/em> (2015) and Kristin George Bagdanov\u2019s petrozines \u201cCrude Futures\u201d and \u201cAfter the Amplify Energy Oil Spill.\u201d Written \u201cwhile physically shaping their forms,\u201d George Bagdanov explores the meanings held in the \u201cconstraints of paper, folds, reproducibility\u201d of the zines as materialized poetic devices. We are also pleased to feature the work of two artists, Ruth Beer and Steve Rowell, both of whom have engaged with one of the most common visual tropes of oil representation\u2014the aerial photograph of extractive landscapes\u2014in markedly different ways. Tomas Borsa and Ruth Beer explore ways of viewing and locating (siting and sighting) oil through the materiality of weaving in their reflection on Beer\u2019s hand-woven jacquard tapestry Oil Topography<\/em> (2014), also featured as the cover image of this issue. Emily Roehl concludes our issue by interviewing Steve Rowell about his experimental documentary Midstream at Twilight<\/em> (2016). They discuss how oil\u2019s landscapes become sites of \u201cpolitical imagination\u201d as well as deep time.<\/p>\nAcross this special issue, the contributors take what Rowell identifies as the \u201clong view\u201d: a dual practice of \u201creverse-looking into the depths of history as well as the unknown speculative futures we face.\u201d This multi-angle perspective, we propose, may help to better locate ourselves in a world mediated by and through oil, while imagining times-to-come beyond it.<\/p>\n
\nWorks Cited<\/h2>\n
Gomez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.<\/p>\nPasek, Anne. \u201cLow-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy.\u201d Engaging Science, Technology, and Society<\/em>, no. 6, 2020, pp.\u00a034-38. https:\/\/doi.org\/DOI:10.17351\/ests2020.363<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nRachel Webb Jekanowski <\/div>\n
\n
O<\/span>il and its infrastructures extend throughout the cultural and socio-political worlds in which we live. From the sacrifice zones of fossil fuel production to the toxic sheen of industrial spills, fossil fuels are at once world-creating and world-destroying. Oil mediates the worlds around us. Like infrastructures used to transport fuel, audio-visual media and other forms of cultural production (galleries, museums, poetry, film, visual art) can serve as conduits for ideas about energy, identity, relationships to the nonhuman world, and history. This special issue of Imaginations<\/em> on \u201cCritical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media\u201d explores how textual and audio-visual media have been used to examine petroleum\u2019s place within Canadian and American cultural landscapes and oil\u2019s attendant socio-political and economic structures. Contributors in this issue employ conventional humanities scholarship and creative approaches to the materiality and histories of oil both to trace energy histories and to explore the visual and literary arts as tools of scholarly inquiry.<\/p>\n Building on Imaginations\u2019<\/em> long-standing engagement with petrocultures scholarship, including Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis\u2019s 2012 special issue \u201cSighting Oil,\u201d the authors included herein approach petroleum as a form of mediation as well as a resource mediated across cultural forms. Writing from within North America\u2014where we live and work across diverse Indigenous traditional territories\u2014many of the contributors foreground how settler colonialism frames petro-cultural production and social imaginaries as one such manifestation of \u201cextractivism\u201d (Gomez-Barris 2017; Szeman and Wenzel 2021). The seed for this issue sprouted from a panel at the 2019 Biannual Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Conference called \u201cMediating Power: Indigenous, Settler, and Corporate Petro-Media,\u201d held at UC Davis. Like the participants in the panel, the artists and scholars in this issue of Imaginations<\/em> take up different facets of petromedia to examine the complex entanglements of cultural production, settler colonialism, and petroleum extraction. Critically, these contributions foreground visual media in their analyses, featuring original videos, photographs, film stills, and documentation of exhibitions. However, not all institutions and practices are equally implicated in oil. Part of our aim with this issue is to think through how artists, writers, and practitioners address fossil fuels on different scales and with differing impacts on culture and society. In holding these tensions, we acknowledge that scholarly analyses of settler cultural institutions like those herein nevertheless benefit from the colonial extractive systems they seek to critique.<\/p>\n In the elapsing years between the ASLE panel and the issue\u2019s publication, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic radically destabilized the ways researchers and artists can undertake their work. Yet in the early months of the pandemic, personal and professional losses gave rise to calls to radically reimagine how we work, imagine the global economy, and structure societies. It is within this context that we, as guest editors, sought to reframe our expectations of academic scholarship by asking contributors to produce shorter pieces and encouraging formal and conceptual experimentation. This resulting issue has also been undertaken almost entirely during the pandemic, an event that continues to lay bare the structural inequalities inherent to Canadian and American energy systems and society. Moreover, most of the contributors are themselves in the early stages of their careers as scholars and creative practitioners. We would like to acknowledge their hard work, undertaken between heavy teaching loads, Ph.D.\u00a0defenses, and job applications. We are also grateful to Gwladys Bertin for her scrupulous translations.<\/p>\n We are particularly excited to share this work digitally with Imaginations<\/em> readers as part of our shared commitment to imagining (no pun intended) more equitable and less carbon-intensive forms of scholarly publishing (Pasek 2020). As energy humanities scholars, we are critically aware of how our research practices\u2014from flying to archives and field sites to the resource-intensive production process for print publications\u2014are entangled in high-carbon forms of transportation and labour. While contributing a small percentage of global carbon emissions, the carbon-intensive nature of academic work nevertheless contributes to conditions creating the climate crisis. Our decision to publish with an open-access, digital journal is part of the praxis this issue seeks to explore: how the methods and forms of petrocultural research inform the histories, infrastructures, and aesthetics of oil we seek to trace. Digital publications have their own material and energy requirements, of course\u2014the work of this special issue has relied on dispersed servers, devices, grids, and the resources required to run them. Despite these trade-offs, there remain significant material, ethical, and political considerations at play in doing lower-carbon publishing and publishing without paywalls.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he organization of this issue is a practice in playfulness. We invite readers to tack between the academic essays and creative submissions, which adhere to their own rhymes of analysis, speculation, and introspection. The issue shifts from literary analysis (Karpinski, Unrau), poetry zines (George Bagdanov), and speculative histories (Vargas) to investigations of archival suppression (McCurdy) and critiques of museum practice (Sharp). Artistic interventions (Borsa and Beer, Roehl) bookend the issue. By ordering the pieces in this way, interweaving distinct approaches to oil, art, and knowledge, we demonstrate the expansiveness of petromedia scholarship and art-making while highlighting the importance of local interventions.<\/p>\n The authors and creators in this special issue locate oil that is both present and absent, hyper-visible and invisibilized. Some contributors consider how the modern oil industry influences which cultural products are and are not produced. Camille-Mary Sharp analyses the Canadian Museum of History\u2019s newest permanent exhibition, the oil-sponsored The Canadian History Hall (2017), while Patrick McCurdy excavates the CBC docudrama The Tar Sands<\/em> (1977), a film banned after a legal dispute for its portrayal of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed\u2019s dealings with Syncrude. Many of the contributors use speculative approaches to this slippery substance, as in Elia Vargas\u2019 \u201cExcerpts of the Tome of Light,\u201d which imagines scenes from the site of the first oil discovery in Western Pennsylvania, or Melanie Unrau\u2019s imaginary comic strip encounter between S.C. Ells, a tar sands \u201cfounding father,\u201d and his legacy, a \u201cpetromodern dystopia\u201d of doomed waterfowl in Alberta\u2019s tailings ponds.<\/p>\n Other contributors experiment at the boundaries of poetic analysis and form, as in Max Karpinski\u2019s reading of Lesley Battler\u2019s Endangered Hydrocarbons<\/em> (2015) and Kristin George Bagdanov\u2019s petrozines \u201cCrude Futures\u201d and \u201cAfter the Amplify Energy Oil Spill.\u201d Written \u201cwhile physically shaping their forms,\u201d George Bagdanov explores the meanings held in the \u201cconstraints of paper, folds, reproducibility\u201d of the zines as materialized poetic devices. We are also pleased to feature the work of two artists, Ruth Beer and Steve Rowell, both of whom have engaged with one of the most common visual tropes of oil representation\u2014the aerial photograph of extractive landscapes\u2014in markedly different ways. Tomas Borsa and Ruth Beer explore ways of viewing and locating (siting and sighting) oil through the materiality of weaving in their reflection on Beer\u2019s hand-woven jacquard tapestry Oil Topography<\/em> (2014), also featured as the cover image of this issue. Emily Roehl concludes our issue by interviewing Steve Rowell about his experimental documentary Midstream at Twilight<\/em> (2016). They discuss how oil\u2019s landscapes become sites of \u201cpolitical imagination\u201d as well as deep time.<\/p>\n Across this special issue, the contributors take what Rowell identifies as the \u201clong view\u201d: a dual practice of \u201creverse-looking into the depths of history as well as the unknown speculative futures we face.\u201d This multi-angle perspective, we propose, may help to better locate ourselves in a world mediated by and through oil, while imagining times-to-come beyond it.<\/p>\n Gomez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.<\/p>\n Pasek, Anne. \u201cLow-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy.\u201d Engaging Science, Technology, and Society<\/em>, no. 6, 2020, pp.\u00a034-38. https:\/\/doi.org\/DOI:10.17351\/ests2020.363<\/a>.<\/p>\nInterweaving the Creative and the Critical<\/h2>\n
Works Cited<\/h2>\n