Nelida Fuccaro - Building Oil Knowledge in the Arab World

Centre for Gulf Studies (CGS) Virtual Seminar Series (5th March 2024) with guest Nelida Fuccaro
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Abstract:
This paper looks at the intersection between corporate and institutional strategies, visual culture, and local publics in the engineering of new cultures of oil in the 1950s and 1960s Arab World, particularly in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Mostly using visual materials produced by the propaganda machine of foreign-owned oil companies, Arab Oil Congresses and OPEC I will discuss how company public relations offices, foreign oil executives, and Arab oil technocrats shaped a new sphere of petro-engagement that sought to capture the attention of different local and regional audiences.
This lecture will delve into different modalities of representation of petroleum landscapes as vehicles of transmission of knowledge about the oil industry to a wide local and regional public: as technological zones populated by the new oil communities, with a tight man-machine connection that bound happy local workers to unfailing and glitzy infrastructure of oil extraction, processing and transport.
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Bio:
Nelida Fuccaro is a professor at @nyu-abudhabi specialising in the history of the modern Middle East with a focus on the Arab World, particularly Iraq, the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula and Kurdistan. Although a regional specialist, she has a keen interest in cross-regional and inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of urban history, oil societies and cultures, public violence, and historical borderlands.
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