A skin as black as oil: The Manichean oil city and the colonial practices of oil extraction in southern Iran, an infrastructural analysis of Mohammadreza Safdari’s “Siasanboo”

Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza and Hashemi, Behnaz (2025) A skin as black as oil: The Manichean oil city and the colonial practices of oil extraction in southern Iran, an infrastructural analysis of Mohammadreza Safdari’s “Siasanboo”. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, [isaf079]. (doi:10.1093/isle/isaf079).

Abstract

The oil city has invariably been a Manichean city in Iran during the long 20th century. The birth of oil industry and production of oil in southwestern Iran was concomitant with the production of space – where the imperial oil company (AIOC) produced southern Iran as a resource frontier for the extraction of cheap oil and labour. As a scrutiny of the most prominent instances of such oil cities in southern Iran demonstrates, these urban spaces were starkly compartmentalized, enclaved, and dichotomized. Such dynamics are particularly discernible in how these oil cities were marked by racial segregation, infrastructural unevenness, socio-cultural division, and ontological hierarchy between the native Iranian locals and labour force on the one hand, and foreign (mainly British) employees of the imperial oil company (APOC and later AIOC) on the other. Pondering the multi-scalar entanglements between the questions of oil, space, race, and gender in such a context, this article takes a salient and striking work of Iranian petrofiction, entitled “Siasanboo” (1979) by Mohammadreza Safdari, as its focal point. The thrust of the argument here is that “Siasanboo” evinces what we call an infrastructural vision. As will be demonstrated, this infrastructural vision takes multiple forms in the story. It is primarily revealed in how it discloses the ontological intertwinement between the colonial logics of oil extraction and production by the imperial oil company (AIOC) on the one hand, and the questions of gender, labour, racial and spatial politics dominating the oil-rich southern Iran on the other. Above all, what distinguishes “Siasanboo” is its exposure of on the entanglements between the libidinal economy and political economy of oil where the micro-politics of desire is indelibly intertwined with the macro-politics of oil.

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