Settler petromobilities: Alec Follett, ‘Oil and the Hard-Boiled: Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy of the American Century in Thomas King’s Cold Skies’, in Nathan Ashman (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler petromobilities: Alec Follett, ‘Oil and the Hard-Boiled: Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy of the American Century in Thomas King’s Cold Skies’, in Nathan Ashman (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between oil and the hard-boiled mode in Cherokee author Thomas King’s Cold Skies (2018). Uniting the fields of crime fiction and petrocriticism, the chapter first traces how the hard-boiled developed alongside twentieth-century American petromobility. It then analyses how King uses hard-boiled conventions to make legible how oil is both an abstracted commodity associated with pleasure and power and a material substance tied to settler-colonial extractivism and dispossession of Indigenous land. Consequently, I argue to address contemporary oil dependency, we must understand and ultimately rewrite our relationship with the American century and with genre.

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