Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

by Chelsea Schields
Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

by Chelsea Schields

Paperback(First Edition)

$29.95 
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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520390812
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 04/18/2023
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Chelsea Schields is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

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 
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