Settling the Boom
The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil
Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun, Editors
Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. The collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.”
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Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.
This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.
Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.
Cover alt text: Grid of nine wooden cubbyholes. Center has title and editor names. Surrounding ones hold mix of worn, dirty materials from a drilling site.
$27.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1387-8
$108.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1386-1
248 pages, 36 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, February 2023
Mary E. Thomas is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is coauthor of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction and author of Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of Urban Education.
Bruce Braun is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life and author of The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast, both from Minnesota.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: (Un)settling the Boom
Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun
1. The Settler Heteropatriarchy of Boomtown, USA
Mary E. Thomas
2. Bakken Aesthetics: Art and Attachment in the Era of Tough Oil
Thomas S. Davis
3. Anthropocene Realism: Genres of “Energy Independence”
Morgan Adamson
4. Crisis Ordinariness: The Bakken Boom in Late Capitalism
Bruce Braun
5. On the Dark Side of the Boom: Narratives of Social Crisis and Liberal Arts of Governance
Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun
6. The Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle: Vulnerability, Security, and Settler Colonialism in the Oil Assemblage
Kai Bosworth
Beyond Settler Infrastructures: A Conclusion
Bruce Braun and Mary E. Thomas
Contributors
Index