Knox Hall, Room 207

How did oil's demiurgic powers mould the social and cultural life of the Middle East in the twentieth century as the largest petroleum producing region in the world? Starting from a discussion of the main themes that inspired the recent volume edited by the speaker with Mandana Limbert (Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold, 2023) this lecture focuses on some of the visible/invisible manifestation of petroleum in the Arab World in the 1950s and 1960s, and on oil's power to mediate the social and cultural life of the region.  Taking a visual approach, this talk explores how the oil industry created new national and social imaginaries, and visual and artistic practice through the production and circulation of propaganda materials for local audiences that portrayed Arab workers, cars as marvellous ‘oil machines’, and petroleum infrastructure through images and stories that naturalised petroleum's new technical and corporate worlds.