Mystical Oil: Mapping the Oil Narrative in Fictio

Oil's representation is shaped by the resource's biological properties and its material forms of flow, which are features that contribute to its mystification as a commodity bringing instant and laborless wealth. I examine oil's impact on narrative by charting some of the transnational formal and thematic patterns in literature shaped by the oil fetish and its mystified transformative capacities. Through a comparative reading of Upton Sinclair's Oil!, Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, and Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel and Oil on Water, I aim to locate the specific ruptures oil creates on temporal and spatial structures that shape the narratives of modernity and historical progress in the twentieth and twenty first century. I highlight two central tropes in oil fiction: oil's alteration of the time-space dialectic and supernaturalism as an expression of oil's logic, in order to trace how oil's undermining of older temporalities and transformation of space are revealed in global oil capitalism's restructuring of the systems of production, the alteration of ecologies, and the new patterns of movement of people, ideas, and commodities.