Fossil Fictions

Abstract

This chapter explores twentieth-century fiction that registers how the extractive relationship between land and people described in Chapter 1 developed during the twentieth century. The first part of the chapter focuses on the specific emergencies that were connected to the turn to coal in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US, and the final section discusses how the militarization of oil energies in the US gave rise to an increasingly self-assured, but also progressively anxious, climate narrative that worries about both biospheric breakdown and world-system transformation. The chapter introduces the concepts of coal frontier narrative and Petrowar fiction as textual modes that contribute strongly to the formation of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

Fossil Capitalism and Fossil Fiction

The intensification of the slave economy in the early American republic coincided with the global rise of what Andreas Malm (2016) calls ‘fossil capital’. The turn to fossil energy vastly increased capitalism’s ability to colonize and settle land and to extract nature cheaply from it. This, in turn, transformed, expanded, and accelerated capitalism as such. As Malm argues, when steam power was introduced, the energy it supplied was not necessarily more abundant or cheaper than water or wind, but steam did provide the opportunity to insert labour into the production process in novel and, for capitalism, ultimately very profitable ways. Freed from the energy limitations that wind, water, and sun had previously imposed, the capitalist world-system was able to spread its global presence more widely and effectively. It is no coincidence that the latter half of the nineteenth century, when steam had become the main accelerant of the world-system, has been termed the Age of Empire (Hobsbawm 1987). During this era, the colonial/capitalist system was spread to virtually all parts of the world until, shortly after the turn of the century, some 84 per cent of the world’s land surface had been formally colonized by European nation-states (Atkin and Biddiss 2008, p. 177).

The turn to fossil energy and the consequent establishment of new commodity frontiers created new possibilities, comforts, and privileges for the US settler community, but it also produced new insecurities and emergencies, and thus also of new ways of managing these. Coal demanded a great deal of labour and work at the coal commodity frontier, or in the many coal-fuelled industries that grew up around urban centres, was often very dangerous. Meanwhile, the lack of, or reluctance to obey, labour laws often meant that workers were cheated out of their fair wages. From the perspective of capital, the emergence of a vast, interracial, unionized, and frequently militant body of labour was a considerable problem to profitable extraction and it was often addressed, as the chapter shows, through (para-)military campaigns. In addition to this, the rise of fossil capitalism nurtured already existing tensions between the dominant nation-states within the expanding world-system. With the emergence of the fossil-energized military-industrial complex, the production of instruments of war, and war itself, became increasingly important to capitalism. This complex facilitated new and uniquely deadly and mobile types of weapons such as the ironclad warship and, after the turn to oil, the tank, and the aeroplane. In view of this development, it is not surprising that the first half of the twentieth century saw two uniquely deadly world(-system) wars.

These insecurities and capitalism’s attempts to manage them were registered by US literature and early films written and produced from what, by the early twentieth century, had become the new core of the world-system. This chapter thus focuses on films and literature from the US first during its transition from an ambitious semiperipheral nation into a core nation, and then as the new core of the world-system. As discussed, this is a historical development profoundly marked by the tremendous acceleration of capitalism’s ability to generate capital and privilege, but also by new and increasingly ecocidal extractive systems and by the two world wars that demonstrate the enormous destructive potential of fossil capital. The chapter discusses in particular how the fiction under scrutiny registers the systematic social and ecological violence that characterizes these specific stages, and how it narrates this violence as an inevitable response to emergency and crisis. This body of texts can be termed fossil emergency fiction, a concept that references Andreas Malm’s (2017) ‘fossil fuel fiction’ described by him as ‘fiction dealing with fossil fuels and imagining some disaster linked to them’ (126). Malm’s term brings the systemic processes that have caused global warming to the fore, and it thus functions as a important corrective. Fossil emergency fiction does essentially the same, but unlike the stories that Malm’s work centres on, my focus is exclusively on fiction from the core and how it narrates the various emergencies that coal and oil are perceived to both create and resolve. Literature and film produced from this vantage not only register crises linked to fossil fuel, they also suggest fossil resolutions to these crises.

In what follows, the chapter first turns to the establishment of the coal commodity frontier and the intense human and ecological violence enacted there. This is followed by a section that looks specifically at the (military) potential, insecurities, and violence afforded by the turn to oil. While the rise of the US within the world-system has been registered in a plethora of ways in fiction, and from very different positions within this world-system, these particular narratives clearly build on the legacy left by the early settler capitalist text and by the white plantation narrative. Based on the same extractive logic as these earlier types, and taking place in similar capitalist storyworlds, the texts analysed in this section also seek to sanitize the increasingly profound ecological and human violence utilized as responses to the crises that drive the story. In this way, they constitute important stages in the emergence of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

Coal Frontiers and Coal Insecurities

The first industrial revolution, accelerated by coal, iron, and cheap labour, arrived relatively late in the US. When it did, it was a development partially provoked by the military and economic emergencies generated by the War of 1812. Following the rise of Napoleon, Britain sought to limit trade between France and the US while at the same time protecting its hold over Canada and resisting further expansion of the US into the American West. In 1814, as part of this effort, the British marched to Washington where they burned several government buildings; still the only occasion when US borders have been breached by a foreign army. With its access to European industries and markets compromised, the US decided to fast-track the construction of its own industrial and economic infrastructure. This project was termed the American System and included tariffs on imports, the establishment of national banks, and the construction of railroads and steam-powered shipping routes that connected producers of raw materials with industries, consumers, and the international market.

In 1832, Secretary of State Henry Clay—the main architect of the American System—celebrated the material wealth created by the restructuring of US banking, infrastructure, and industry he had helped accomplish. From the vantage of the emerging core, he produced the following image of a transforming US:

whole villages [are] springing up, as it were, by enchantment; our exports and imports increased and increasing; our tonnage, foreign and coastwise, swelling and fully occupied; the rivers of our interior animated by the perpetual thunder and lightning of countless steamboats; the currency sound and abundant; the public debt of two wars nearly redeemed; and, to crown all, the public treasury overflowing. (Clay 1857, p. 440)

In this description, coal and capital perform a kind of striking (white) magic that transforms and modernizes the agrarian state. Out of the pastoral and debt-ridden America of the early republic, an urban utopia rises, literally out of the ground. This is early carbon modernity as progress and privilege; as the engine of capitalist prosperity and of national financial and military security.

While coal transformed life for the emerging white core of the American republic, it also produced a new set of insecurities that this white settler community had to consider. Coal does not lend itself to the corporeal metaphor that describes fossil fuels as the lifeblood of American capitalism as easily as oil. Yet, as Peter A. Shulman observes in Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (2015), it was as important to nineteenth-century US industry, commerce and war-making as oil was during the late twentieth century. As Shulman argues, ‘[w]hen seen from the perspective of coal, the great process of industrialization and the emergence of the United States as a global power unfolded at the same time as intertwined processes’ (p. 6). As the energy that fuelled industry, that kept merchant vessels, trains, and navy ships running, it was coal that made it possible for the US to take an increasingly central position within the world-system.

This put coal at the centre of discourses and systems of securitization. To keep industry and trade going, and to enforce the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that aimed to keep European powers out of the western hemisphere, extraction at the coal commodity frontier had to be made secure. From the early nineteenth century and onwards, this was a major concern for the federal government, local industries, state and private militias, lawmakers, and writers within the evolving US semiperiphery. In Washington, ‘the American approach to energy’ was thus shaped by ‘politicians and policy makers’ and by ‘naval administrators and officers, who played central roles in articulating the significance of coal for the navy’ (Shulman 2015, p. 8). At moments of national or international tension, the flow of coal from coal mines to the navy became a crucial imperative. In particular, a steady supply of coal was essential during the Civil War and in connection with the attempt at formal empire building that followed in the wake of the Spanish–American war in 1898.

This, in turn, put pressure on local contractors tasked with delivering coal to industry and the military at a low cost. Because the mining of coal was extremely hard work, this meant securing access to (cheap) labour. In the antebellum South, enslaved people were frequently utilized to work in the coal mines (Lewis 1987; Adams 2004). After the war, formerly enslaved people remained a crucial labour resource.¹ For many, the first step away from the plantation led to the mines and industries that had grown up close to these mines. In parts of the South, and increasingly in the North, coal mining was also performed by poor white communities and by newly arrived, unskilled European immigrants.

In writing from the semiperipheral commodity frontiers where coal was extracted, this development is, not surprisingly, described as disorienting and violent. In the opening chapters of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), the author describes how he worked as a child labourer in the coal mines of West Virginia. In this text, the coal mine is narrated as a confusing and labyrinthine space:

I do not believe that one ever experiences anywhere else such darkness as he does in a coal-mine. The mine was divided into a large number of different “rooms” or departments, and, as I never was able to learn the location of all these “rooms,” I many times found myself lost in the mine. To add to the horror of being lost, sometimes my light would go out, and then, if I did not happen to have a match, I would wander about in the darkness until by chance I found some one to give me a light. (p. 38)

In addition to this, it is also a location that promotes both physical and intellectual death:

There was always the danger of being blown to pieces by a premature explosion of powder, or of being crushed by falling slate. Accidents from one or the other of these causes were frequently occurring, and this kept me in constant fear. Many children of the tenderest years were compelled then, as is now true I fear, in most coal-mining districts, to spend a large part of their lives in these coal-mines, with little opportunity to get an education; and, what is worse, I have often noted that, as a rule, young boys who begin life in a coal-mine are often physically and mentally dwarfed. They soon lose ambition to do anything else than to continue as a coal-miner. (pp. 38–39)

These passages can be considered a straightforward attempt by Washington to describe his encounter with the coal commodity frontier, but it is also possible to read it as a sequence that registers, from the perspective of the (semi)periphery, a more general sense of being lost within a new economic and ecological space. Washington has managed to exit the agrarian slave plantation environment only to be introduced into an underground world of darkness, insecurity, and confusion. In other words, the passage shows Washington folded into the world-system as cheap labour but also as ‘Cheap Nature’; a semi-human resource to be extracted. It should be added that it was Washington’s cheaply paid extractive work, but also his position as an extractable resource, that made Clay’s vision of an urban American utopia, magically rising from the land, possible.

In this way, and considering both Clay’s and Washington’s descriptions of early fossil capitalism, texts from the US sometimes register the abject violence of the coal economy, but they also at times elide it or displace it as a kind of magic. Stephanie LeMenager (2014) has observed that when oil became ‘an expressive form’, oil itself was often ‘hidden […] in plain sight’ (p. 66). In the same way, American late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction is about coal also when it does not make this energy form its main concern. American writing from the period thus typically narrates coal energies from the same core perspective as that employed by Clay, focusing on the new type of urban modernity that coal made possible. In other words, coal is present in stories that are not about coal extraction, but about the wealth, privileges, romances, and comforts it produces for certain strata of American society. Such writing registers the enormous wealth that early carbon modernity generated, but casts it, like Clay does, as a strange, enchanted unfolding of the American republic.²

However, there is also an extensive body of writing from the turn-of-the-century US semiperiphery that makes coal extraction and coal burning clearly visible and that directly registers the violence used to secure cheap labour. These narratives make visible the securitization strategies designed to contain land and people, and, as in the plantation text, they make visible some of the ecological havoc that coal mining generated (and generates). Yet, like the plantation text, these fictions still envision extraction as inevitable and progressive. A case in point is the fiction of John Fox Jr., one of the first American authors to write what today is considered a bestseller. His first commercially successful novel was The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903). This story about Kentucky during the Civil War was adapted into films in 1920, 1928, and 1961 before its rehearsal of racist tropes became too politically problematic for Hollywood to adapt. These tropes are also present in his bestselling The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), a novel similarly adapted into several films by the early Hollywood industry. This text, like much of Fox’s other writing, is set on the coal commodity frontier.

Fox had a stake in this frontier. As Darlene Wilson (1995) has observed, he and his half-brother James ‘were involved in developing the modern southern coal industry, particularly in the bituminous coal fields of Old Virginia, northeast Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky’ (p. 6). Thus, Fox writes in his own interests and from a space of capitalist opportunity and privilege. Fox’s writing is a part of the recasting of America from a rural nation to an urban carbon society, but its focus is very much on the coal commodity frontier itself, narrated as a pioneer frontier landscape. As Henry D. Shapiro (1986) and Rodger Cunningham (1990) have noted, Fox’s stories rehearse the established colonial saga where white, masculine figures enter a both primitive and feminized landscape inhabited by uneducated and belligerent people engaged in brutal tribal violence.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine exemplifies this trend through its description of the hero protagonist, coal prospector John Hale, as a ‘by instinct, inheritance, blood and tradition—pioneer’ (p. 40). Thus, Fox casts the coal prospector as a next-generation settler who enters a territory where the frontier that Fredrick Turner (1893) celebrated as an important but vanished driver of American societal evolution can be rediscovered. This frontier space is inhabited by poor white, possibly racially mixed, people who stand in for, but also effectively erase, the Cherokee, Yuchi, and Shawnee people who used to live in the mountains. Hale has arrived on this landscape because he is in search of coal, and he soon locates an especially rich vein on the land of a local family named Tolliver: ‘that coal, cannel, rich as oil, above water, five feet in thickness, easy to mine, with a solid roof and perhaps self-drainage, if he could judge from the dip of the vein’ (p. 35). Unlike the Tollivers, Hale understands, and is in fact an agent of, coal’s relationship to the world-system. Looking at the coal, he knows that there is ‘a market everywhere—England, Spain, Italy, Brazil’ (p. 35). Hale does feel a pang of guilt for taking advantage of this knowledge: ‘if he would take the old man's land for a song—it was because others of his kind would do the same!’ (p. 36). Indeed, other prospectors are closing in: ‘The English were buying lands right and left at the gap sixty miles southwest. Two companies had purchased most of the town-site where he was—HIS town-site—and were going to pool their holdings and form an improvement company’ (p. 127). When Hale and other prospectors have finished buying up the land and started to extract coal, people and society rapidly transform. June, the daughter of the primitive Tolliver family, undergoes a ‘[m]agic transformation’ (p. 227) much like the city in Clay’s description, and in the previously impoverished local community money is suddenly as ‘plentiful as grains of sand’ (p. 234). Hale finds himself ‘on the way to ridiculous opulence and, when spring came, he had the world in a sling and, if he wished, he could toss it playfully at the sun and have it drop back into his hand again’ (p. 233).

However, in other passages, it is clear that the coal frontier also produces considerable social and ecological havoc. Coming back to the house and land where she grew up, June Tolliver notes how the harsh yet pristine mountain has been transformed:

[T]he willows bent in the same wistful way toward their shadows in the little stream, but its crystal depths were there no longer—floating sawdust whirled in eddies on the surface and the water was black as soot. Here and there the white belly of a fish lay upturned to the sun, for the cruel, deadly work of civilization had already begun. Farther up the creek was a buzzing monster that, creaking and snorting, sent a flashing disk, rimmed with sharp teeth, biting a savage way through a log, that screamed with pain as the brutal thing tore through its vitals, and gave up its life each time with a ghost-like cry of agony. Farther on little houses were being built of fresh boards, and farther on the water of the creek got blacker still. (pp. 201–202)

While this passage is short, it is also notably visceral in its description of the destruction of the local ecosystem. The passage focuses on the violent ecological transformation of a small section of the mountain, but this transformation is, of course, connected to what is going on all around the world. Because Appalachian coal has already been linked to a world market (‘England, Spain, Italy, Brazil’ [p. 35]), the ecological emergency briefly described is clearly tied to the world-system. Like the plantation text, then, this passage registers extraction as detrimental to the land. It is a fleeting yet striking sequence that can be read as an eruption of what Fredrick Jameson (1981) has termed the political unconscious that fissures even the capitalist, pro-extraction novel. In other words, the passage acknowledges that extractive capitalism, here termed the ‘work of civilization’, erodes ecology. At the same time, the novel in its entirety never suggests that this civilization is optional. Deadly as it is, its evolution is described as progressive and inevitable.

The extractive practices performed on the coal commodity frontier also provoke social violence in the novel. Workers at a quickly erected brick plant call a sudden strike: ‘armed with sticks, knives, clubs and pistols, they took a triumphant march through town’ (p. 93). In response to this sudden crisis, Hale creates an improvised police force. This is to be the instrument by which the strikers and other unruly elements are reinserted into extraction. Hale engages friends from the valley to help in this work. They are described as ‘Bluegrass Kentuckians … of pioneer, Indian-fighting blood’ (p. 88). Thus, the novel connects the improvised police force with former soldier settlers such as Underhill, responding to the insecurities created by Indigenous people. At the same time, Hale and his fellow officers look to the Ku Klux Klan for inspiration. This organization, ‘they all knew […] had been originally composed of gentlemen’ (p. 95). In this way, the novel also connects the budding police to the post-Civil War effort to undo the civil liberties gained by formerly enslaved plantation workers.

Alex S. Vitale (2017) has argued that the primary function of police forces in (Anglo) society has been to ‘maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism’ (p. 36). Hale may be the just and vigilant hero of the novel, but it is still clear that his reinvention of policing on the Appalachian coal commodity frontier is geared towards the imminent need to create a social, judicial, and paramilitary order that allows extractivist capitalism to do its work.³ In other words, Hale’s police force is another strategy designed to manage some of the insecurities that extraction and the law of Cheap Nature create. Hale (and the novel in its entirety) insists that this adaptation is fundamentally legal, but the genealogy of the force, its roots in settler capitalist violence and the Ku Klux Klan, reveals how this effort is underwritten by a fundamentally racist system of indiscriminate violence invented as an attempt to manage Indigenous people during settlement, and black agency after the Civil War. As such, this force introduces not the law as much as a permanent and extra-legal state of exception.

In the novel, the police force does indeed resolve the emergency that insurgent labour poses. Extraction continues until all the coal has been dug from the land and until those resisting extraction have died violent deaths or given up. In the final passage, Hale unites with a now thoroughly civilized June, cementing the notion that the coal commodity frontier is also capable of revitalizing people at the site of extraction. In this way, the novel exemplifies how writing from the privileged US semiperiphery makes use of tropes inherited from both the settler colonial text and the plantation novel. Like these earlier narratives, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine registers how extraction produces disturbing ecological and social devastation, and it leverages (displaced) indigeneity and unwilling labour as agents of crises. At the same time, and again like these prior literary forms, it describes extractive capitalism as essential and inevitable, and poses (para) military violence as the only way to manage crises. These are elements that have long been rehearsed by the settler capitalist and plantation text, and they are also clearly carried over into The Trail of the Lonesome Pine as another forerunner of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

The Petrowar Oil Encounter

In World Literature and Ecology, Michael Niblett (2020) describes how the limits of the coal economy, the depression of the 1930s, and the (global) Dust Bowl, forced capital to reorganize labour, land, and extraction. The ‘lifeblood’, Niblett observes, ‘of this new phase of capitalism and the specific forms of mass production, consumption, and transport it involved’ (p. 206) was oil. The British Empire, already contracting in the wake of WWI and beset by (coal miner) strikes at home, was unable to effectively adapt to this new phase so that, as Niblett puts it, the ‘new regime of accumulation’ was ‘dominated by the United States’ (p. 206). This signals the moment when the US finally replaced a contracting British Empire as the hegemon of the world-system. From this moment on, a great deal of American writing can be said to emerge out of the self-confident core of this world-system, even if the US is still made up of regions that remain semiperipheral to this new core.

At this stage, oil had begun to accelerate all aspects of the world-system, including its ability to burn massive quantities of fossil fuel and, as a consequence, release greenhouse gases into the biosphere. In the interwar years, the US was able to source most of its oil from the semiperipheries that existed within its own borders, but after North American oil production peaked in 1971, the US grew increasingly dependent on ‘foreign oil’ (Painter, 2014). Before long, the need to acquire oil as quickly and cheaply as possible demanded a new type of energy geopolitics, one capable of opening up Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East to oil companies located in the Global North. This, in turn, created a new set of insecurities, ecological emergencies and crises, as well as a revised set of (military) strategies and technologies by which these were managed.

In other words, oil transformed and energized how extractive capitalism operated across the planet, while at the same time revolutionizing the tools used to secure extraction. Specifically, oil was at the centre of the military’s invention of new ways to access (enemy) space, new types of weapons, and new ways of combating not just the enemy but the very geography (forests, jungles, cities) in which the enemy was located, and, in the process, it produced new ways of perceiving the planet and its people. These technologies were made possible by oil, but they were also tools through which oil could be secured. The increasing centrality of the dispersed oil commodity frontier for American capitalism and the evolution of war technologies that oil enabled (and enables), make it possible to talk about a new kind of warfare. From this moment on, many wars are Oil Wars or Petrowars. This is a war fought using a war machine accelerated by oil, and it is also a geographically dispersed war for oil. In this way, Petrowar functions as a kind of circular economy of energy, capital, securitization, and death where the ultimate goal of Petrowar is to secure access to the energy form that fuels it and the society it serves. Most importantly for this study, the advent of Petrowar greatly enhanced the capacity of the war machine to kill people, control labour, level architecture, and destroy the land people inhabit.

In The Shock of the Anthropocene, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) use the concept of the Thanatocene to highlight how central a part the military has played in the history of socio-ecological breakdown. They note that the increase in the human death toll during the wars fought by the US during the twentieth century was accompanied by an increase in the burning of fossil fuels (and thus also in the amount of CO₂ released into the atmosphere). During WWII, the US army, under the command of General Patton, consumed 1 gallon or 3.7 litres of petrol per person per day. During the Vietnam War, this figure had increased to 9 gallons or 33.2 litres, and during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a total of 15 gallons or 55.5 litres of petrol per person per day were used. As Bonneuil and Fressoz also observe, an Abrams tank uses 40 litres of fuel per 10 kilometres while the B-52 bomber uses 12,000 litres of jet fuel per hour. In the present moment, the US Department of Defense, despite its endeavour to limit its use of oil, remains the world’s single largest consumer of hydrocarbons (Crawford 2022, pp. 7–8), and the CO₂ it releases into the atmosphere signifies an ancillary planetary violence that adds to global warming (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, pp. 123–124).

Bonneuil and Fressoz also note how, during the twentieth century, Petrowar technologies made it possible to effectively make war on the planet itself. Petro-weapons such as napalm were invented to make it possible to target not just individual people or even groups of people, but entire areas where people might be sheltering. Napalm was thus used to destroy fields, forests, waterways, and other ecosystems vital to the long-term survival of the enemy. This was done with increasing intensity during both world wars until, during the Vietnam War, Bonneuil and Fressoz observe, an ‘estimated 85 per cent of the ammunitions used by the US Army were targeted not at the enemy but at the environment sheltering them: forests, fields, cattle, water reserves, roads and dikes’ (p. 127). During the same war, the US also employed the herbicide Agent Orange to de-leaf and destroy vast forests. Indeed, if the Vietnam War was an attempt to securitize Asia from communist influence, and thus ensure that other Asian countries would remain cogs in the capitalist world-system, this goal was accomplished through large-scale violence done to Vietnamese forests, waterways, animals, and fields. To securitize the extractive and capitalist world order that Captain John Underhill paved the way for, as discussed in Chapter 2, Underhill’s strategy of ‘burning and spoyling the Countrey’ (1638, p. 14) was applied on a global scale.

Petrowar Fiction

As the energy that ushered the US into an era of world-system dominance, oil has had an enormous impact on world culture. In a review from 1992 (a time when the US and allies had recently ceased the hostilities in the Persian Gulf that have been named the First Gulf War), Amitav Ghosh coined the influential concept of Petrofiction to describe texts that investigate ‘the Oil Encounter’ (p. 29). In this review, Ghosh argues that, despite the centrality of oil to America and the world, the Oil Encounter has produced ‘scarcely a single work of note’ (p. 29), and he speculates that this may be because to Americans ‘oil smells bad’ (p. 30). Problematizing both these claims, Stephanie LeMenager argues in Loving Oil, Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014) that ‘the story of petroleum has come to play a foundational role in the American imagination’ (p. 5). In her study, she pays particular attention to the ‘charisma of energy’ and notes that while ‘[c]oal fictions emphasize labour struggles, the potential power of the strike, and solidification of a working class’, the petrotext narrates the ‘materialization of the liberal tradition in middle-class self-possession’ (p. 5). By doing so, petroleum is encountered everywhere: in the apartment store, the automobile, the cinema, and the jet aeroplane. Literature set in such places can also be called Petrofiction, but unlike the type of Petrofiction that Ghosh can find little trace of, it is written at the core rather than at oil’s peripheral or semiperipheral commodity frontier.

Because American writing is saturated by oil it would be possible to investigate a plethora of very different Petrotexts from the core. Again, some of these texts would register the pleasures that oil makes possible, while others would narrate the US exploitation of oil peripheries in the Global South as masculine adventure. However, the type of narrative that most interestingly continues the kind of ideological work performed by the settler colonial text, the plantation novel, and the coal frontier text, and that thus paves the way for the American Climate Emergency Narrative, is the Petrowar text. Oil may be present in virtually all post-WWII American fiction in some way, but oil as well as the attempt to secure oil extraction, is arguably most directly encountered on the battlefield. Indeed, the meeting with the bomber aeroplane and the tank during WWI were direct and brutal Oil Encounters. The German WWII ‘Blitzkrieg’ that used highly mobile motorized infantry in combination with dive bombers was completely organized around oil’s capacity to accelerate war. The attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by the US’ attempt to limit Japan’s access to oil in the Dutch East Indies (Feis 1950; Stinnett 2001), and the aerial attack itself was also an Oil Encounter. Similarly, Dresden during the Allied firebombing, London during the Blitz, the Vietnamese villages that were showered with napalm during the Vietnam War, and the bombing of parts of Iraq in 1991–1992 and again in 2003, were sites of the Petrowar Oil Encounter.

American fiction from the core has been enormously fascinated with Petrowar and there are an extensive number of novels, films, songs, artworks, and games that narrate it. These texts register the violent effect that Petrowar has on earth-bound soldiers and civilian life, but they are equally interested in the oil-accelerated machines of war: the submarine, the battleship, the tank, the jeep, and, above all, the combat aeroplane. In such texts, the oil encounter is the meeting with the petroleum-fuelled machines of modern warfare, with the enormous destructive power they bring, and with the new visual vantages they introduce: the aerial perspective afforded by the fighter plane, the periscopic view of the submarine, the gun-aim of the tank. Like pornographic films or slasher horror, the plot is not necessarily the point of this type of text. Rather, these films’ main subject is the demonstration of the oil-accelerated machines of war. A central moment of the Petrowar text is when the Petrowar machine embraces the soldier, allowing him (or, on the rare occasion, her) to wield the astoundingly destructive potential of oil. As part of the combat aeroplane or the submarine, the soldier is afforded new mobilities and new ways of performing violence. In this way, the effort to securitize extractive capitalism on a planetary scale is narrated as a merger between a militarized agent of capitalism and the Petrowar machine.

One of the most striking and widely disseminated Petrowar texts is unarguably Top Gun (1986), directed by Tony Scott. To be able to shoot the extensive aerial action sequences, the film made use of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and different military branches of the US Department of Defense. This relationship has been termed by James Der Derian (2001) the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment network (MIME-Net) while Mackenzie Wark (2007) and Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood (2005) call it the Military Entertainment Complex.⁴ As briefly mentioned in the introduction, this Complex is essentially a circular economy where the narrative is doctored to stimulate the industrial production of military hardware, recruitment of soldiers, and actual military engagement. This hardware, these soldiers, and these engagements then produce new narratives that energize another turn of the cycle. In this way, the capitalist core directly intervenes in the production of narrative.

Top Gun can thus be described as a text that erupts directly out of the material and political core of the hegemonic world-system. In return for expensive aircrafts, the film conveys an image of the US Petrowar machine as enormously powerful, effective, and precise. The protagonist of the film is not really Tom Cruise’s hell-raising pilot, but the petro-accelerated war machine it features. Top Gun thus opens with images of fighter jets being serviced and sent off into an early dawn. Smoke billows around the jets as the sun rises and the morning sun is then eclipsed by the roaring bright fire coming out of the twin tail engines. Steel wires in the start and landing strip reveal that these jets are taking off from an aircraft carrier. People clad in helmets and overalls move around the jets, dragging hoses with aircraft fuel, tuning wheels, and celebrating a successful landing with impromptu dance moves. This is a film about accelerated American Petrowar on a planetary scale. Set on a mobile war platform traversing the Indian Ocean, within reach of Middle Eastern oil fields, fighter jets incessantly take off and land—ever vigilant and potent—fuelled by the oil economy they have (in fact) been built to protect (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

Scenes from the opening of Top Gun (1986) showing fighter jets taking off, being refuelled, and landing

The assistance that the Military Entertainment Complex lent Top Gun encouraged the folding of the protagonists, and by extension the viewer, into the embrace of the Petrowar machine. A constant worry for these protagonists is that they might be dismissed from the organization that allows them to exist as part of the fighter jet aircraft. Such dismissal would deprive them of access to godlike powers of destruction and for the audience, it would also mark the end of the cinematic Petrowar narrative. In addition to this, the violence that the intrepid heroes perform is clearly designed to address a crisis central to American capitalist petromodernity. In Top Gun, the enemy is obviously still the Soviet Union and the prize is continued access to the oil flowing from the Middle East. In this way, Top Gun is also an example of what Jean-Michel Valantin (2005) and Georg Löfflmann (2013) have called national security cinema. This is cinema that casts the ‘perception of threat as an existential danger to survival, security, and order against which American power is mobilized’ (Löfflmann, 2013, p. 282). As national security cinema, Top Gun thus poses American Petrowar as the only force capable of addressing an often vaguely described or even allegorized insecurity.

The American Climate Emergency Petrowar Narrative

While Top Gun is obviously a film about petro-emergency, it is not a film that clearly registers the coming of an epochal crisis for the capitalist world-ecology. Such Petrowar films do begin to appear in the late 1990s however, and as such testify to what Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter have termed the Age of Anxiety (1996). Dunant’s and Porter’s book is one of many publications circulated during the closing years of the twentieth century that note how many Americans looked towards the future with considerable trepidation. Their anxiety is fuelled, Dunant and Porter argue, by diffuse economic, technological, political, and environmental concerns that blend into a general, but similarly vague, end-of-millennium angst. This was a time of relative economic prosperity when the US had appeared to seize permanent control of the world-system, but it was also a time when the utopia promised by such development was failing to materialize. The neoliberal economic program launched by Reagan in the 1980s had begun to erode job security in the core. The IPCC, formed in 1988, had published a series of publications and their two first Assessment Reports, published in 1990 and 1994, clearly describe the inexorable unravelling of biospheric erosion.

To the Petrowar narrative, and to the US DoD that had helped fund it, the vague contours of the anxieties that haunted the US core at this point in time were both a problem and an opportunity. Deprived of the convenient enemy the Soviet Union had constituted, the Military Entertainment Complex searched for new threats that could be vanquished on the cinema screen. As I discuss in the next chapter, the kaiju was employed as an allegorical manifestation of such a threat. However, in the mid-1990s, the most successful foils in the Petrowar film were interstellar aliens. Of these films, the most successful was Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich and opening on July 2, 1996. In the film, an armada of alien ships arrives on planet Earth on this precise date. They gather over the major metropolises of the world-system and loom threateningly over iconic constructions such as the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, and the White House. On July 3, the armada launches a coordinated attack, eradicating city centres and the White House with powerful energy beams. The US military attempts to strike back, but invisible energy shields protect the alien ships, making them invulnerable to conventional Petrowar and even to atomic weapons. The American president is saved at the last minute and taken to a secret research facility where he and his advisors begin planning the resistance (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2

Caption: Energy beams from an alien ship obliterate the White House in the film Independence Day

Independence Day is in every way an emergency narrative. John Dixon (1996) has attributed the film’s enormous commercial success to the fact that it ‘appeared at a moment of widespread anxiety about job security in a culture in which downward mobility is experienced, particularly by men, as personal failure and impotence’ (p. 92). In this way, it is a response to the slow unfolding of neoliberalism and the general sense of emasculation that this arguably produced for (white) men suddenly expelled from the Fordist system. In his detailed study Independence Day, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Enola Gay (1998), Michael Rogin concurs with this general analysis but he also expands it to show how Independence Day responds to, and attempts to resolve, a host of anxieties that haunted US society in the late 1990s. In Rogin’s reading, the film addresses fears provoked by the fact that the US was becoming increasingly multicultural and queer. These fears are then resolved by making black and Jewish people join in the attempt to save the Christian settler-state, and by reasserting the dominance of the white heterosexual. Rogin also notes how the film is part of an attempt to reaffirm the US as the good and benevolent hegemon of the world-system, a nation-state able to, and supremely interested in, defending this world-system. In this way, as the title of Rogin’s study argues, the film ultimately teaches its audience to ‘stop worrying’ about the extractive violence that the US has exerted to reach its dominant position, and to ‘love the Enola Gay’.⁵

Dixons’ claim that the success of Independence Day is due to its effective mining of anxieties central to its particular moment in time, and to its normative assertion of US white, male, heterosexual dominance, is convincing. It is also obvious that the film is informed by the wider geopolitical developments of the era; the sense that, as Samuel Huntington (1996) puts it, the world-system is moving towards a general ‘clash of civilisations’ that may result, as the title of his book spells out, a ‘remaking of the world order’. These anxieties are not overtly tied to socio-ecological breakdown, yet they exist, of course, as part of the interrelated epochal crisis. Again, the crisis that Moore (2015) has argued the planet is moving towards is not simply a biospheric crisis but a crisis for the capitalist world-ecology. In other words, it is a crisis experienced by and through capitalism-in-nature (p. 13). When this is considered, Independence Day allegorizes not simply a national crisis but rather the arrival of a terminal crisis for the capitalist world-ecology.

Thus, Independence Day can be said to give expression to what Mark Bould (2021) terms the Anthropocene unconscious. Bould’s thesis is that—contrary to Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) idea that virtually nobody is writing about the biospheric crisis—a great wealth of culture is informed on some level by the growing socio-ecological crisis. As Bould phrases it, ‘the Anthropocene is the unconscious of “the art and literature of our time”’ (p. 15). The particular political unconscious of Independence Day can be said to have been partly inherited from British author H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds 1898), published at a moment in time when the British Empire had begun to fall apart and the US had begun to transition to the position of hegemon of the world-system. This is a story about how technologically advanced Martians have depleted their world and have come to the Earth to colonize it and establish new commodity frontiers. To make sure that readers reflect on this allegory, Wells asks them in a foreword to remember that the British exterminated the Indigenous population of Tasmania during their effort to colonize Australia. In this way, the Martian attempt to colonize the Earth enacts colonialism in reverse. The British are now exposed to the extractive violence they have for so long practised in other parts of the world. Independence Day leaves this foreword out. Nobody is asked to reflect on the violence of Hiroshima, Vietnam, or the 1990–1991 invasion of Iraq in Independence Day. Yet, this violence and this military campaign hover inverted over the violence performed by the aliens. Through its imagery of profound socio-ecological devastation, Independence Day still registers the extractive violence of the global, capitalist, fossil fuel economy.

This noted, it should also be observed that the solution to the apocalyptic emergency the aliens constitute in Independence Day is the same as in Top Gun: Petrowar. As in Top Gun, the protagonist (Will Smith) is a US Air Force pilot. Even the US president turns out to be a former pilot and in the cataclysmic final battle, he takes to the skies alongside the rest of the US war machine. Again, the only way to address the dispersed epochal crisis that the film evokes is through organized military petro-violence. In this way, Independence Day is in every way a fossil emergency fiction where Petrowar resolves the allegorized crisis that informs the narrative. Those who have not invested in this technology, and who do not heed the American call to a ‘counter-offensive’, stand impotent before the crisis. The closure of the film is the triumphant resurrection not just of US world-system hegemony, but of faith in this entity.

Independence Day did seek to collaborate with the US DoD but the producers were turned down due to setting part of the movie in the mythologized Area 54 (Felber 1999). However, as argued by Löfflmann (2013), the success of the film still paved the way for the next generation of alien Petrowar films. The Hollywood spectaculars Battle: Los Angeles (Liebesman 2011) and Battleship (Berg 2012) are two examples of films that received substantial support from the US Department of Defense, and that made use of this to describe how aliens’ attempts to colonize the planet are thwarted by the petro-accelerated US military. In these films, US Petrowar is again the only mechanism capable of defending a universalized humanity against the various emergencies that the alien invaders represent.⁶ Thus, in fossil emergency fiction, the harrowing shape of extra-terrestrial forces obscure the politics and the planetary history that have brought about the social and ecological crises that inform the story. In this way, the US military again appears as the only entity capable of addressing the allegorized geopolitical and ecological upheaval that is at the heart of this crisis.

Setting the Stage for the Climate Emergency Narrative

Many of the Fossil Fictions discussed in this chapter tell stories about how extraction depletes labour and land, but at the same time, they insist that violence is the only possible response to the crises such depletion causes. Coal miners existing on eroding commodity frontiers must be struck down by armed militia and actors within (or formally outside) the world-system that resist the expansion of a hegemonic US must be levelled with the help of Petrowar technologies. Such violence, and even more so the spectacular Fossil Fictions that narrate this violence as adventure, work to obscure the history and politics that produced it in the first place. In this way, this fiction joins the settler capitalist and plantation text in nurturing Vandana Shiva’s (1993) ‘monocultures of the mind’ (p. 5) that limit thinking capable of imagining worlds and ecological relationships beyond those produced by extractive capitalism. The coal extraction narrative launches this type of text, and the Petrowar story further raises the stakes of this fiction. Separated from the coal frontier narrative by two world wars and by bloody neocolonial conflict in Asia, by US peak oil, and by the realization that fossil fuel/capital is eroding conditions for life on the planet, the Petrowar text is framed by a much more profound sense of crisis and emergency. This sense is discernible in Top Gun and it saturates films such as Independence Day. However, there is never any doubt in these films that the US presence on the battlefields of Europe, on the Indian Ocean, or in space, is necessary. The enormous aircraft carrier, the constant burning of jet fuel, the rockets, machine gun fire, and the occasional dying off of heroic pilots are all inevitable responses to a world-system that is becoming increasingly difficult to negotiate. The Petrowar conducted in these and similar films is the only possible response to large-scale geopolitical (or intergalactic) emergency.

In Top Gun, the US is prepared for such an emergency. Independence Day tells a similar story, only in this film, the crisis has taken on apocalyptic proportions. If Petrowar fails, it is not just American petromodernity that will end, but the planet. This recalls Jameson’s observation that ‘[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ (1994, p. xii) only what is imagined in this film is the invasion of the planet by a hostile alien civilization. In Independence Day, the end of capitalism’s ability to perform Petrowar would be the end of the world. It should also be noted that texts such as Top Gun are made possible by support provided by institutions, agencies, networks, and departments that are tasked with securing the core. DoD-sponsored national security cinema such as Top Gun, Battle Los Angeles, and Battleship which Valantin (2005) and Löfflmann (2013) discuss is thus core cinema in every sense of the word. As discussed in this chapter, and as I will return to, they emerge out of a concerted and highly conscious attempt to stimulate American corporations, create goodwill and potential recruits for the armed forces, and to thus extend both American hegemony of the world-system and the capitalist world-system as such. Unlike the other texts discussed in this book so far, they are not simply the voice of (white, male) authors located in, and privileged by, the core: they are the booming voice of the core.

Fossil Fiction is a type of text that builds on the foundation that the settler capitalist and plantation narratives established. This fiction notes even more clearly than the previous types that the land suffers because of extraction and other types of violence, yet it also promotes the extractive relationship to land and people as inevitable and somehow regenerative. It is through the production and telling of stories that insist that the extraction of fossil energies is vital to the US as the aspiring or dominant core of the capitalist world-system, even when such extraction causes widespread human and ecological death, that Fossil Fiction paves the way for the American Climate Emergency Narrative. Fossil Fiction is not the same thing as the American Climate Emergency Narrative since the crisis it envisioned is not epochal and ecological to the same extent as in this narrative. However, since Fossil Fiction imagines that the crises that coal and oil produce can also be addressed through the society these energy forms make possible, especially as these energy forms are militarized, it shares significant DNA with the American Climate Emergency Narrative. As coming chapters reveal, the notion that the vaguely conceived problem (extractive, capitalist modernity) is somehow also the solution, is something that the American Climate Emergency Narrative will rehearse ad nauseam.