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Petro-Melancholia The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief stephanie lemenager The title of an August 2010 article in the satiric newspaper The Onion, "Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe," ironizes the systemic violence and long duration of the petro-imperialism that was reanimated through the BP blowout. Describing the routine docking of an oil tanker at Port Fourchon, Louisiana, The Onion continues: "Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse."1 As Rebecca Solnit notes, the BP blowout is "a story that touches everything else."2 Solnit's comment, which is not satiric, points to why the article in The Onion is recognizable as humor. The BP blowout marks a rough edge of what we in the United States and arguably in the developed world take for granted as normal, petroleum economies that generate multiple levels of injury. Mike Davis has written of the "dialectic of ordinary disaster" in relation to the apocalyptic rhetoric that defamiliarizes predictable geological events such as landslides in the poorly sited inland suburbs of
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press
Published: May 6, 2011
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