Biography:

Ryan Jobson is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology. He is also a social scientist and Caribbean cultural critic trained in anthropology and African American Studies. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractive resource development, technology and infrastructure, states and sovereignty, and histories of racial capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial Americas. Broadly, his research examines the relationship between modern energy regimes (i.e. plantation slavery, carbon-based fuels) and the modern political ideal of sovereignty. 

Book Title: The Petro-State Masquerade: Power and Sovereignty in Trinidad and Tobago

The Petro-state Masquerade theorizes how postcolonial political futures in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago come to be staked to the market futures of crude oil, natural gas, and their petrochemical derivatives. As an ethnography of energy, labor insurgency, and statecraft, this book manuscript examines how the tenuous relationship between oil and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro- state—is articulated by postcolonial state officials as a “masquerade of permanence” sustained by speculative fossil fuel ventures. When, today, low oil and gas prices, diminishing reserves, and renewable technologies threaten the viability of the Trinbagonian energy sector, state officials stage masquerades that depict fossil fuels as inexhaustible resources waiting to be unearthed by multinational capital and novel extractive technologies. Meanwhile, working class Trinbagonians play masquerades of their own—in the form of strikes, protests, and the Carnival Road march—to stage direct democratic alternatives to the fossil economy.

In sum, this book applies this Carnivalesque register to sovereignty as a practice in which the provisional authority of state agents masquerades as total and absolute. In political science and international relations, the Caribbean is often derided as a geography of weak or quasi-states characterized by political violence and infrastructural breakdown. By studying the state from the perspective of quintessentially small places—sensu Jamaica Kincaid—where state authority cannot be taken for granted, this book intervenes conceptually and methodologically in the anthropology of the state. While ethnographic approaches have inquired into the inner working of state bureaucracies through empirical studies of public servants and petty officials, the Petro-State Masquerade instead examines the distance between narratives crafted by state actors and the vexed realities of failed extractive and petrochemical infrastructures. Where anthropological studies of petroleum-exporting states have focused on oil boom periods and the spectacle of state windfalls, this study draws on fieldwork conducted during a period of low energy prices in which the permanence of oil is imperiled by declining domestic production and the existential threat of climate change.