Nelida Fuccaro (NYU Abu Dhabi), Building Oil Knowledge in the Arab World: Humanising and Naturalising Oil Landscapes in Saudi Arabia and Iraq

This paper looks at the intersection between corporate and institutional strategies, visual culture, and local publics in the engineering of new cultures of oil in the 1950s and 1960s Arab World, particularly in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Mostly using visual materials produced by the propaganda machine of foreign-owned oil companies, Arab Oil Congresses and OPEC I will discuss how company public relations offices, foreign oil executives, and Arab oil technocrats shaped a new sphere of petro-engagement that sought to capture the attention of different local and regional audiences. The aim was to lift the veil of secrecy that had surrounded the operation of the oil industry before WWII to create petroleum ‘intimacies’ and ‘synergies’ able to enforce the corporate and political loyalty of new petroleum subjects, who were to be shaped as politically quiescent (or active) new oil communities. To do so this lecture will delve into different modalities of representation of petroleum landscapes as vehicles of transmission of knowledge about the oil industry to a wide local and regional public: as technological zones populated by the new oil communities, with a tight man-machine connection that bound happy local workers to unfailing and glitzy infrastructure of oil extraction, processing and transport; as geological enclosures identified with a ‘sacred’ subsoil that was shaping late colonial and post-colonial national histories; as theme parks where processes of oil extraction were presented in the image of and in harmony with pristine local cultures and natural environments; and as new spaces of national/Arab solidarity moulded by the quantification and visualisation of the industry in the pursuit of transparency about its past and present.

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