On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy by Imre Szeman (review)

On Petrocultures draws together a number of Imre Szeman's previously published essays from the past twenty years across a range of topics and themes, including globalization, neoliberalism, and petrocultures. The collection also includes two important new pieces: an introduction to the energy humanities that engages with the role of the public humanities in the contemporary moment and an extended elaboration of "pipeline politics." These new essays, in particular, self-reflexively theorize the range of critical fields and approaches within the collection, offering the energy humanities as a necessarily interdisciplinary theoretical framework that "demands … a wholesale refashioning" of our "critical vocabularies" in order to respond to the needs of the present.

The introductory essay begins with the difficulty of articulating the stakes of the climate crisis to the general public. As Szeman styles it, the climate crisis has inaugurated a newfound urgency regarding public-facing scholarship, which now more than ever becomes a necessary consideration for academics involved in climate research. Climate scholars must grapple with the question of "how to effectively communicate about global warming," a challenge, Szeman argues, that is "less of available data than of rhetoric and representation." There is a casual chattiness to the introduction, as Szeman narrates his movements from his local coffee shop to the dog park, sometimes overhearing alarming conversations betraying his neighbours' climate skepticism. This stylistic choice puts into practice the essay's claim about the relationship between complex climate humanities research and the general public: "Pointing didactically to hyperobjects like the climate or global warming isn't likely to generate a change in my fellow citizens. But I've found that engaging them with a story about energy … shifts the frame of reference."

On Petrocultures introduces two linked ways of thinking about the project of the energy humanities. On the one hand, the energy humanities intend to "unnerve the continuing legibility of the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, as currently practiced"; on the other hand, Szeman centres a consideration of the ways in which "energy and social possibility are linked." We might reframe the twinned project of the energy humanities as, first, a critical gesture – what history, politics, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies have missed by under-engaging with energy – and, second, an aspirational one: what political possibilities emerge in the present and future as we refashion these critical fields with a renewed attention to energy. Indeed, the collection self-reflexively performs this work; Szeman's writing on topics as wide-ranging as "national allegory" and "the entrepreneurial subject" becomes newly animated through a consideration of the energy humanities, which opens new lines of flight or vectors for analysis. In its re-presentation of previously published essays under the sign of oil, On Petrocultures enacts the very "unnerv[ing]" of critical fields that it describes as central to the project of the energy humanities.

Szeman's major new article, "Pipelines and Territories: On Energy and Environmental Futures in Canada," constitutes an important contribution to petrocultural criticism in Canada. He isolates two opposing tensions in public discourse around the construction of pipelines. Drawing on editorials written weeks apart in the Globe and Mail, he positions the "reanimated politics surrounding pipelines" as emerging from an incommensurability between the exigencies of the economy and the environment: "Canada needs to get serious about its economy, and so it needs pipelines; Canada needs to get serious about its environment, and so more pipelines moving more oil might be the last thing it needs." But a third term intervenes and torques this schematic: settler colonialism. Szeman himself recognizes the role of the settler-colonial state when he draws a link between pipeline politics and environmental racism. While arguing that the "hiddenness" or invisibility of pipeline systems is an important aspect of their political impact, he notes that there are certain constituencies "for whom pipelines are all too visible – those in impoverished or rural communities, or indigenous Canadians whose territories pipelines often crisscross."

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