About SPAN 4675 A
Studies the theme of petroleum in Latin American culture. A principle theme is the analysis of the importance of petroleum in the creation of the modern, globalized world as well as the formation of global capitalism. Prerequisites: SPAN 3615, SPAN 3620, SPAN 3665, or SPAN 3670, or Instructor permission.
Notes
Prereqs enforced by the system: SPAN 3615, SPAN 3620, SPAN 3665, or SPAN 3670
Section Description
This course studies petroculture, a neologism that is used by critics to describe the intersection of oil and culture. But what is petroculture? It is something we live with every minute of every day, and yet is something that, like oil, is sticky and slippery. It sticks to everything and, when we think we understand it, it slips from our grasp.
It is possible to think of it like the Force in Star Wars. In Star Wars Episode III, a movie made released in the midst of the 1970s oil crisis, Obi Wan Kenobi explains the Force as, "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." Though he was talking about a far more spiritual thing, what he says is also true of oil. It is almost impossible to find something that is free of the stain of oil, it is everywhere and powers almost everything, yet we very infrequently see it or think about it. I challenge you right now to find more than two things that are not made by or with oil or that were not transported to you using petroleum...(I'll wait).
While the larger questions of this course are how does oil shape culture, how does it create the reality we live in? How does it limit the w think, move, imagine, and interact? It is primarily concerned with four Latin American countries, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, that have similar yet very different relationships to oil. All of them have in common the fact that they greeted oil and the and the machines it powered not only for the money oil could bring, but even more (especially in the case of Cuba and Puerto Rico) for the freedom and independence the machines, the technology, promised. Poets wrote love poems to smog, painters as leftist as Diego Rivera, portrayed a futuristic melding of indigenous Mexican culture and Henry Ford's machines to create a utopian future. Revolutionaries as leftist as Fidel Castro or Che Guevara lauded the petro fueled machine as providing a means of independence and the construction of a Marxist utopian state. As we are all seeing now, the futuristic dreams of equality and harmony came crashing down.
In his The Magical State, Venezuelan critic, Fernando Coronil, talks about the "paradox of plenty" that oil dependence brought to his country and others in the global south. While great riches were promised, which could result in greater sovereignty and a loosening if not demolition of the limits of coloniality, the opposite happened. A few people became very wealthy, while poverty and all the ills that had been part of Latin America since at least the age of colonialism remained in place. This course analyzes how four countries with different relations to oil became dependent on its power (financial as well as technological) and how that dependency either destroyed them, as is the case of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Venezuela, or left them at best disillusioned, as happens in Mexico.
As awful and dystopian as that is, we will not end the course in despair. We will finish the course looking at how artists and others use the rubble of petro created catastrophe to imagine different relations and possibilities beyond the dependence on oil and the petrocultural regime.
Section Expectation
Do the homework and come to class ready for a lively and informed discussion in Spanish.
Evaluation
Midterm, final, short paper (article review) leading into a research project of your choosing (in consultation with me of course).
Important Dates
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Resources
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