Towards a poetics of the pipelines: an infrastructural analysis of the figure of the pipeline in Iranian petrofiction

Abstract

Whilst the studies of petrofiction have been proliferating over the past decade, there has been a dearth of engagement with one of the earliest and most salient sites of oil extraction and production in the world: Iran. This essay is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Taking as its focal point the figure of the pipeline and its representations in a number of Iranian short stories, this essay demonstrates how pipelines are depicted as simultaneously the material and metaphorical face of oil infrastructure and oil ontology. Its crux comprises a demonstration of how pipelines are depicted as critical junctures where not only the relational dynamics between the local and the global are revealed, but also where the uneven extractive logics informing the practices of the imperial company (AIOC) are exposed. Accordingly, this article will elaborate some of the crucial facets of the pipeline as it features in Iranian petrofiction. These include: the pipeline as a material object facilitating the flow of liquid capital; as a metonym for oil ontology; as a symbol of local natives’ ambivalent relationship with oil, that is, simultaneously a traumatic object and an object of desire; as an ironic signifier of colonial-capitalist forms of extraction and dispossession; and a perverted displaced object of desire, and a cause of revealing the repressed traumas of the native subjects and their relation to oil and British Petroleum oil company; pipelines as psychologically-invested objects of displaced affects and traumas; pipeline as a hyperobject.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record