Translating Oil

This book interrogates a variety of translation processes that take place when petroleum-based cultures are established, maintained, and dismantled.

Through a range of case studies, it shows how energy transition actualises questions of translatability and reflects on how we can learn to communicate better among disciplines, languages, cultures, and generations. Many of the texts and artefacts at issue emanate from regions that tend to pass unnoticed in the predominantly anglophone petroculture studies. In this book, short stories and essays from Iran, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates are made available in English for the first time along with philological comments and ecocritical analyses. Other contributions include chapters dealing with inter-semiotic translations in comics, theatre adaptations, musical performances, photo books, and TV series.

Translating Oil is a long-awaited resource book for students and scholars in the environmental and energy humanities, and a fresh take on petroculture studies. Focusing on energy transition as a translational problem also makes the book highly relevant for translation studies and epistemology. Other affected fields are comparative literature, English literature, Scandinavian studies, Middle East studies, Southeast-Asian studies, human geography, comics studies, performance studies, visual culture, and media studies.