259 - Petrostates (feat. Ryan Cecil Jobson)

The China adventure continues for your two co-hosts. Cymene and Dominic report from Zhangzhou, a small city of five million in Fujian province, and talk about party hotel life and what might have been the first energy humanities workshop in the country. And then (9:02) we welcome Ryan Cecil Jobson to the podcast to discuss his groundbreaking book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (U Chicago Press, 2024). We begin with how petrostates seek to assert their permanence even in times of obvious crises and Ryan's insights into how the performance of permanence becomes all-powerful in maintaining petrostate legitimacy. We move from there to exploring the significance of Caribbean culture in T&T fossil fuels, thinking about the tension between the state masquerade and the people's masquerade, and the historical transition from plantation labor to oil field labor. We close talking about petronostalgia, speculative sovereignty, efforts in T&T to unlock ultradeepwater drilling, and the importance of "dwelling in the hyphen" when it comes to nation-states and petro-states. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.