Brent Bellamy, "The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil"

Presented on October 11, 2025 in the Quarry Farm Barn as part of the Twelfth Quarry Farm Symposium "Energy Studies."

The aesthetic textuality of oil names both oil’s impact on cultural production and the development of particularly oil-bound social formations and habits. A form of petrocriticism, it seeks to demonstrate the total, unbreakable hold of fossil fuels on media at every level: production, distribution, consumption, and waste. The talk will begin with an overview of literary and f ilmic approaches to making the world of oil apparent. Yet, such texts tend to offer only a partial sense of oil relations. They do not quite achieve the leap from text to matter one might hope for given climatic deterioration and the intensification of fossil fuel extraction. In its back half, this talk turns to James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 travelogue THE OIL ROAD, which offers a compelling way of mapping the relation of oil to literature, infrastructure, and simply being in the world. THE OIL ROAD struggles with the limits to representing oil’s grip on cultural, economic, and social systems. By tracking fossil fuel infrastructure, THE OIL ROAD is able to consider both history and geography; it describes produced landscapes and their origins. In this way, THE OIL ROAD offers an entry point for activists, artists, and researchers to map the spatial, historical, and social and economic relations created by oil.

Brent Ryan Bellamy teaches in English and in Cultural Studies departments at Trent University and in Communications at Ontario Tech University. His ongoing research is focused on mediating the real world through cultural objects, specifically related to fossil capital and the myriad forms of oppression and dysregulation it amplifies. As such, his latest work is on storyworlds and worldbuilding. Bellamy is editing an issue of STORYWORLDS Storyworlds on collaborative worldbuilding and writing a small book for MIT press on Worldbuilding. His published work includes MATERIALISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ENERGY, AN ECOTOPIAN LEXICON, and REMAINDERS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY.