“Hello Mama, precious Mama, a sketch of life in petro-dollar”: phallogocentric oil regimes and the infrastructures of race, labour and gender in Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Petrol Station

Abstract

Tapping into the intersection of the genealogical temporality of trauma, the geological temporality of oil, and the biopolitical temporality of racialized extraction under petrocapitalism, this chapter will demonstrate how Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Petrol Station illustrates how the surplus capital accumulation by petrocapitalism is contingent on the production of dispensable racialized bodies but also the extraction of cheap gendered bodies – ranging from national minorities to transnational labour force both rendered into a state of bare life particularly in the context of Arab Gulf states with their law of Kafalah. Scrutinizing the hybrid dramatic form (including elements of irrealism, allegory, Ta’zieh, and grotesque) informing Petrol Station, in conjunction with a specific directorial/dramaturgical technique (deployed in the premiere of the play at the Kennedy Centre in Washington in 2017), it will be shown how the peripheralized minority – featuring in the play as gendered and racialized bodies - carve out a transversal and deconstructive (read decolonial) space through the use of minoritarian form and language as a means of unburying the dead and repressed and liberation. It will also be argued how this infrastructural aesthetics developed in the play as a decolonial method can be shown to be gaining currency in the broader context of Arab and Anglophone world drama.

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