ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which the political ecologies of sugar and oil have impacted upon fiction from the economic peripheries of the world-system. Produced and utilized as energy sources under capitalist relations of production, oil and sugar have been deeply imbricated in histories of colonial conquest, imperial domination, and the gross exploitation of human and extra-human nature. The chapter examines the distinctive literary idioms generated by this history, paying particular attention to what I will term irrealist registers, such as gothic and magical realism. In so doing, it considers how petroleum and sucrose can seep into the texture of everyday life, patterning behaviors and habitus.
