Fictions of Fossil Capital: The Transformative Effects of Petromodernity and Combined and Uneven Development in the Middle East

Abstract

Energy humanities scholars are mapping the influence of fossil fuels on the conflicted development of human society. The combined and uneven development of the fossil capitalist world-system generates liberal and dictatorial social and economic systems. However, much scholarly commentary on fossil fuels overlooks the role played by energy in the development of modernity, especially in the conflation of modernity with narratives of Western exceptionalism. Postcolonial literary scholarship, for example, tends to overlook the material preconditions of imperialism, including imperialism’s relationship with fossil fuels—particularly the extraction and transportation of oil—focussing instead on cultural epistemologies. Despite the importance of the Middle East to the flow of oil—leading to colonial and neocolonial interventions from the West—Arab literature is often overlooked by postcolonial critics. This thesis examines the representation of fossil capital in three examples of twentieth-century Arab literature. First, I show how the Saudi novelist Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) explores fossil capital’s transformation of values in Arab society, linking cultural change and political struggle to material ecological conditions. The novel contributes to prominent 1980s Saudi discourses regarding modernity, reflecting the position that fossil capital accelerates the pre-existing impulses of modernity, assigning responsibility for the alienation of the Arab working class on a fossil capitalist native elite. Next, I argue that Mahdi Issa al-Saqr’s East Winds, West Winds (1998) examines what it is to be an Iraqi subject moulded by the narratives of fossil capital’s hegemony in the globalised world-system. By drawing attention to the importance of language and textuality when considering political power in the novel, I argue that al-Saqr’s interest in the truthfulness of writing foregrounds the petromodernity of fossil capital as being combined and uneven in the narrativisation of history, as well as in material space. Finally, in Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1962), I examine the biopolitics of fossil capital and the issue of combined and uneven mobility, showing that fossil capital necessitates a loss of worldliness for the Arab working class to facilitate the creation of the modern capitalist consumer. However, these novels also present petromodernity as an opportunity to construct more egalitarian societies in the Middle East, avoiding the glorifications of the past and the ‘culture of death’ that Samir Kassir proposes characterises the ‘Arab malaise’ in Being Arab. Munif imbues Cities of Salt with spectral attributes by removing his central protagonist, calling attention to the disruptive haunting of the fossil capitalist present by pre-modern or persisting coeval modernities, unveiling the crises inherent to capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Al-Saqr is concerned with the ambivalences of history, examining the artificial constructedness of political power structures and national identity through historiographic metafiction. Additionally, despite Men in the Sun’s perceived pessimism regarding the Palestinian condition, I argue that Kanafani’s writing allows for the exile’s reintegration into what Edward Said calls ‘worldliness’. Taking a cultural materialist approach in an energy humanities framework, I use Arab petrofiction to highlight the influence of fossil capital on the construction of narratives about modernity—narratives that entrench the combined and uneven fossil capitalist world-system. These novels illuminate the energy imperialism of fossil capital, a system that generates persistent forms of class conflict within the nation-state but is by no means contained within nation-states. Fossil capital, they reveal, is not only at the centre of the Middle East but at the centre of modernity itself. However, germinating from the representati

Date of Award	1 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Anastasia Valassopoulos (Supervisor) & Robert Spencer (Supervisor)