Mona Damulji - The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil in Iran and Iraq

In countries of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf that are marked as zones of petroleum extraction, foreign oil companies and governments have built and continue to expand gargantuan networks of infrastructure, labor, and scientific expertise required for resource conversion: physical intrusions that overturn existing social and ecological terrain everywhere they touch. And yet, the technical machineries and scientific fields of expertise most associated with oil extraction are not the only processes that make this industrial-scale conversion of matter compressed deep below earth’s surface into “the lifeblood of modernity” possible. Oil extraction also requires storytelling, practices of cultural mediation that attempt the work of making extraction make sense to the general public. Like the physical operations of extraction, cultural mediation also demands dedicated space, equipment, expertise, and labor, which taken together, I refer to as the cultural infrastructure of oil extraction. Drawing from my forthcoming book Pipeline Cinema (UC Press), this talk will examine the origins of oil sponsored filmmaking in mid-century Iran and Iraq to reveal how wells, pipelines, pumping stations, and refineries emerged as sites of cinematic production and exhibition in the context of the worker-led revolutionary struggle against British oil imperialism. 

https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/s62jc5n1QZigV2LR_6pwqw