« Reading Amitav Ghosh on a Tour of Canada’s Petroscapes ». - Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

« Reading Amitav Ghosh on a Tour of Canada’s Petroscapes ».

Claire Omhovère

Résumé

Indian writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh was the first to formulate the paradox of “oil’s literary barrenness” in “Petrofictions,” an essay first published in 1992. Ghosh queried the negligible attention the oil industry received in Western literature over the same period, a little more than a century, when the extraction of oil, its trade and consumption deeply altered geopolitical forces, the structures of an economy gone global, but also the state of the planet’s environment and climate. With the dawning of the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000) the expanding domain of the energy humanities witnessed the multiplication of neologisms tailored on Ghosh’s title. Such compounds as “petromodernity,” “petrocultures,” and “petroscapes” attest to the viscosity of oil, a material resource whose ubiquitous uses seep into the nature / culture divide, dissolving superficial oppositions, easing critical frictions. The transforming effects of oil need to be made visible, if we are to understand its impact on the societies that have grown dependent upon it, and unleash the imaginaries necessary to inspire an energetic transition (Wilson, Szeman & Carlson 2017). Art certainly has a role to play in this matter, as made clear since the turn of the Millennium by unprecedented developments in ecocriticism, in parallel with the production of artistic work that has sought to bring oil and its attendant logics into view. I will be looking at this epochal change through the lens of English-Canadian fiction and a selection of short stories and novels in which the petroscape occupies a central position. The effects of oil on the aesthetic construction of landscape will be analysed starting from a discussion of Ghosh’s theses regarding the literary invisibility of oil, before moving on to consider the subversive, parodic notes its surfacing introduces into the pastoral discourse of settler literature. The discussion will finally turn to a selection of recent Canadian novels in which the petroscape returns the viewer’s attention to the material traces left by oil extraction in situ and in visu, through the stains that blur the landscape’s composition lines and the clarity of vision they seemingly afford. The hypothesis guiding my investigation is that petroscapes suppose continuities and contiguities between the inside and the outside that problematize the very nature of the readers’ (or viewers’) visual pleasure by undermining the safety of a detached, external position.
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Dates et versions

hal-04311552 , version 1 (28-11-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04311552 , version 1

Citer

Claire Omhovère. « Reading Amitav Ghosh on a Tour of Canada’s Petroscapes ».. Contemporary Trends in Postcolonialism. Theory and Praxis. International Web-lecture Series, Sharbani Mukherjee, Oct 2020, Triveni Devi Bhalotia College and Onda Thana Mahavidyalaya (online), India. ⟨hal-04311552⟩

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