“The Petro-State Masquerade” considers how postcolonial political futures in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago came to be staked to the market futures of oil, natural gas, and their petrochemical derivatives. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between oil and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is represented by postcolonial state officials as a Carnivalesque “masquerade of permanence” through the perpetual expansion of fossil fuel ventures. At the same time, low oil and gas prices, diminishing reserves, and renewable energy innovations threaten the viability of the Trinbagonian energy sector.

Since 1998, multinational oil and gas investments in Trinidad have increasingly concentrated in the deepwater sector. Characterized by protracted production cycles, deepwater ventures feature prohibitive costs and a comparatively low probability of success. After several deepwater ventures failed to yield substantive commercial quantities of oil or gas, the unfulfilled potential of a lucrative offshore geology is invoked to mitigate uncertainty and secure the long-term viability of the Trinbagonian energy sector. In their masquerade, state officials depict fossil fuels as inexhaustible resources waiting to be unearthed by multinational capital and novel extractive technologies.

Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research is preoccupied with questions of energy, sovereignty, race, and capitalism in the Caribbean and the Americas. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His writing is featured in American Anthropologist , American Ethnologist , Current Anthropology , The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology , and Small Axe .

Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond, exposes the global threat of environmental catastrophe and the forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women’s lives in the overlooked nation of Guyana.

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives.

Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas—including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking—Global Guyana repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.

Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.

Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.