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Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 304
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
April 18, 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520390812
Format: Paperback
"The book…is grounded in impressive, multi-archival, and multilingual research showcasing a wide range of primary sources that include local publications, personal recollections, oral interviews, governmental papers, and private companies’ studies and reports."
"This account of twentieth-century oil production in the Dutch Caribbean historicizes the making of the oil industry, but also historicizes the making of racialization and of sexual practices and mores."
"Schield's book makes a noteworthy contribution to the field of Caribbean History. Providing rich opportunities to account for the historicity of such seemingly innate and transparent categories as race and sexuality."
"Offshore Attachments is an ambitious exploration of two understudied Caribbean islands and the role they played on a global stage."
"The book documents intimacy vis-à-vis the global oil industry to remind us of how desire, racism, and sex continue to operate via offshore attachments well after the bust of the oil industry, e.g., in the current arrangements and organization of the tourism and leisure industry and in the Caribbean diaspora in Europe. It does so in an accessible form, through careful discourse and archival analysis, a Black feminist sensitivity, and the vantage point of two small islands in the Caribbean."
"The author uses the understudied case study of the oil industry in the midcentury Dutch Caribbean to write a fascinating story of interest to a wide variety of scholars focused on the history of energy and fossil fuels, empire, capitalism, gender and sexuality, Europe, and the Caribbean and Latin America."
"This account of twentieth-century oil production in the Dutch Caribbean historicizes the making of the oil industry, but also historicizes the making of racialization and of sexual practices and mores."
"Schield's book makes a noteworthy contribution to the field of Caribbean History. Providing rich opportunities to account for the historicity of such seemingly innate and transparent categories as race and sexuality."
"Offshore Attachments is an ambitious exploration of two understudied Caribbean islands and the role they played on a global stage."
"The book documents intimacy vis-à-vis the global oil industry to remind us of how desire, racism, and sex continue to operate via offshore attachments well after the bust of the oil industry, e.g., in the current arrangements and organization of the tourism and leisure industry and in the Caribbean diaspora in Europe. It does so in an accessible form, through careful discourse and archival analysis, a Black feminist sensitivity, and the vantage point of two small islands in the Caribbean."
"The author uses the understudied case study of the oil industry in the midcentury Dutch Caribbean to write a fascinating story of interest to a wide variety of scholars focused on the history of energy and fossil fuels, empire, capitalism, gender and sexuality, Europe, and the Caribbean and Latin America."
Chelsea Schields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Oil Is the Lubricant”
1. Crude Bargains: Sex and the Making of an Oil Economy
2. Diminishing Returns: Domesticity on the Edge of Whiteness
3. Manufacturing Surplus: Population and Development in the Downstream
4. “Sexuality, Yes! Slavery, No!”: Erotic Rebellion and Economic Freedom
5. Dutch Diseases: Race, Welfare, and the Quantification of Kinship
Conclusion: Acts of Attachment
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Oil Is the Lubricant”
1. Crude Bargains: Sex and the Making of an Oil Economy
2. Diminishing Returns: Domesticity on the Edge of Whiteness
3. Manufacturing Surplus: Population and Development in the Downstream
4. “Sexuality, Yes! Slavery, No!”: Erotic Rebellion and Economic Freedom
5. Dutch Diseases: Race, Welfare, and the Quantification of Kinship
Conclusion: Acts of Attachment
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index