From Soil to Oil: The Resistance of the Environment in the Cities of Salt (original) (raw)
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Disrupting the Desert Scene: The Impact of Oil Discovery in Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt
Linguistics and Literature Studies, 2015
The Arabic magnum opus Cities of Salt (1984) explores the struggle of Arabs in an unnamed Gulf emirate following the discovery of oil. The picture of Arabs living a harsh life in an oil-producing country may strike some people. Therefore, this paper attempts to establish a new perception by examining the novel and shows the far-reaching impact of oil discovery on the physical and human scene. Furthermore, this paper discusses the American-Arabs encounter displayed in Cities of Salt, which is an important one because it is a cultural confrontation rather than a political one. Because the novel is a quintet-almost 2500 pages spanning over seven decades, this paper looks at excerpts from the first volume that fit more appropriately this paper argument.
Marxism and Oil Literature Characteristics in Abdurrahman Munif's Cities of Salt
European Scientific Journal, 2015
Cities of Salt can be studied as a manifestation of Marx's interpretation of colonialism and economy. Marxism here is used as a mirror that reflects the real faces of the colonizer and the capitalists who uses oil to exploit the Bedouins, their environment, and the workers. Thus, this research argues that studying Cities of Salt from a Marxist and an oil literature point of view helps in unveiling the dilemmas associated with this discovery of oil in the Bedouins' land to the world. This makes this literary work a possible provider of proper solutions to the exploitation which the colonized people and their environment suffers as a result of this oil discovery in their land.
Arab Oil Towns as Petro-Histories
in C. Hein (ed.) The Global Petroleumscape: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Spaces and Imaginaries of Oil (Routledge, 2021), 2021
The modern transformation of the city, highly dependent on the mastery of territorial resources, was linked with the representation of cities as consisting of and functioning through complex networks of circulatory systems, the veins and arteries of which extended across the land and were to be freed from all possible sources of blockage. 01 Metabolic analogies have long been operative in conceptualizing the geographic footprint of urbanism. Prompted by discoveries on the vascular system, the "ideology of circulation" drew on physiological analogies, but also mirrored the accelerating mobility conditions of capital, people, resources, and information. 02 By the mid-nineteenth century, architects and planners began to speak of the city and of the territory using the scientific analogies of metabolism and circulation as key to spatial organization. Terms such as "hybrid natures" and "cyborg cities" have contributed to probing the legacies of modernist divisions between human and nonhuman, the social and the material, the city and nature. They convey the imperative for a simultaneous consideration of the production and reproduction of nature and power for "once we begin to speak of people mixing their labor with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between people and nature. " 03 Although significant, such concepts remain insufficient to theorize the political relations that underpin the harvesting of the earth's materials and the formation of urban settlements. 04 Donna Haraway reminds us that discourses of biology and organisms have "a plot with a structure and function…fashioned into factual truth, with intentionality in narration. " 05 Biological metaphors instrumentalize the image of objectivity of science to ideologically explicit ends, in particular as they naturalize the politics of accumulation and circulation. They favor homeostasis, or a condition of balance of flows, to dismiss blockage, friction, and violence as the necessary corollaries of circulation. The image of objectivity that such scientific analogies perpetuate blurs the boundary between scientific rationalization and social control, 06 between the political economy of circulation and the emergent forms of territorialities. Rather than the annihilation of territory by circulatory networks, territorial organization is necessary to ensure the metabolism of resources. 07