Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil

Nelida Fuccaro is Professor of Middle Eastern History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She has written on cities, public violence, frontier societies and on the urban, social, material and visual cultures of oil in the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Arabian Peninsula. Among her publications, she is the editor of Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016) and of the special issue ‘Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East’ in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East(2013). She is the author of Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mandana Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2002 and joined CUNY the same year. Her publications include her monograph In the Time of Oil (Stanford University Press, 2010), a co-edited volume Timely Assets (School of American Research, 2008), as well as articles and chapters on oil development, temporality, and religiosity in Oman. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Social Text, Ethnos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Starting from oil's strange ability to be at once everywhere and nowhere, this groundbreaking collection reveals the profound ways that oil has shaped the practices and representations of everyday life in the Middle East. Encompassing themes of art and culture, labour, migration, politics, economics and the making of collective and individual subjectivities - this is a brilliant and expansive text that constantly surprises through its insights.

• List of Figures Notes on Contributors AcknowledgementsPART I EXPOSING OIL1 Scouting for Oil in the Middle East Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana E. Limbert2 ‘No Words Around to Describe’: Between Seeing and Comprehending Kuwait’s Oil Fires Farah Al-NakibPART II IMAGE WORLDSVISUALISING PETROLEUM PASTS3 Photographing Crude in the Desert: Sight and Sense among Oil Men Laura Hindelang4 The Oil Company’s Fields of Vision: Public Relations and Labour Images in the Arab World Nelida Fuccaro5 Al-Bahithun: Sounds that Call to the (Oil) FieldsAla YounisPROJECTING FUTURES6 Empathy for the Graph Arthur Mason7 After Oil Rania GhosnPART III OIL SUBJECTSECOLOGIES AND GENEALOGIES OF PETROLEUM KNOWLEDGE8 Speculative Matters: The Pasts and Presents of Oil in TurkeyZeynep Oguz9 Petroprotein Dreams: Hydrocarbon Biotechnology and Microbial Life Worlds in the Middle EastDouglas Rogers10 Making Oil Men: Expertise, Discipline and Subjectivity in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Training Schemes Mattin BiglariNEW SPACES AND MOBILITIES11 Shifting Solidarities: Strikes, Indian Labour and the Arabian Sea Oil Industry, 1946–1953Andrea Wright12 Gender, Domesticity and Speed: American Petro-modernity Nathan J. Citino 13 Oil, Mobility and Territoriality in the Trucial States/United Arab Emirates, Muscat and Oman Matthew MacLean14 Contestation and Co-optation in the Desert Landscapes of Oman Dawn Chatty Bibliography Index