ABSTRACT
The crux of this chapter is an exploration of Oil Field, a play that plunges us into a full-fledged petro-allegorical world. Accordingly, the argument in this chapter will proceed in five steps – unfolding in two sections – where each delves into the dynamics of the aforementioned fivefold process through which an oil-rich peripheral country is produced as a zone of extraction and sacrifice for the assurance of the surplus extraction by the petro-capitalist imperial-colonial powers and the perpetuation of oil as the hegemonic energy resource and of petro-capitalism as the globally hegemonic political-economic order. These five imbricating stages comprise: extraction, production, nationalization, accumulation through dispossession, and anti-production as a process of the subsumption of the oil-rich peripheral country into the globally extended network of extraction/production thereby subjecting it to its uneven logics. Furthermore, the chapter explores the functions and perceptions of oil in conjunction with the ways in which oil features as the magic transformer in contact with which everything – ranging from the individual’s subjective identity and social status to the political-economic fate of a nation – undergoes upheaval. One of the focal points of the chapter will be the play’s illuminating exposure of the dynamics of the transitions from monopoly capitalism to multinational corporatation capitalism with oil as its impetus.
