Chelsea Schields's book is about the material, erotic, and affective imbrication of intimacy and oil in Aruba and Curaçao. It maps the ways in which the oil industry acted as a social “lubricant” (2), influencing the organization of labor, desire, and family, as well as ideas about sex, sexuality, and race throughout the twentieth century. The book addresses two time periods: the first four chapters detail events during the brief oil boom and bust cycles of the 1930s to 1950s (e.g., shifts in sexual and reproductive regulations, moral insurgencies, and erotic rebellions), and the last chapter references events related to the 1973–74 and 1979–80 oil shocks (e.g., the promotion of the tourism economy, offshore banking, migration, and the “indexing” [60] of Caribbean families in Europe).
Connecting the constitution of moral households, sexual freedoms and regulations, decolonization, and upward mobilities, Schields describes how attempts to shape “intimate selves” in support of the energy economy were inseparable from the making and management of love, race, and sex. For example, as access to a materially better life became possible for those working for the oil industry—at least relative to previous generations—upward mobility became inseparable from the racism and discrimination known by the local oil labor force, vis-à-vis North American and European workers, and from forms of “white respectability” used to govern insurrections that might disrupt the status quo. Reading about access to special housing (and segregated) complexes, bungalows, and entertainment facilities as “civilizing” infrastructures, and the subsequent introduction of automation technologies and its links to unemployment and union busting techniques, structural adjustment, and migration, I note parallels in the evolution of the oil industry lived not only in the Caribbean, as Schields beautifully narrates, but also across Latin America.
Another significant argument in this book is the imbrication of control over the oil industry and over sexual practices (e.g., the regulation of marriage, the nuclear family, and family planning to address demographic crises and unemployment), which at times served goals of decolonization and self-determination and at others to govern the social life of populations. In other words, in efforts to govern who oil laborers have sex with and love, differentiated sexual regimes are formed, for foreign and local laborers. This sexual economy connects “homeplace and workplace” and galvanizes a moral compass of respectability, led by oil corporations and state and religious authorities, as well as by citizens. These “intimate arrangements” also served to regulate the fertility of Caribbean women as the industry declined, “domesticate” masculine subjects, and encourage self-sufficient nuclear families. Again, there is strong resonance between stories about how (hetero)sexuality, morality, and respectability lubricated and were lubricated by oil in the Caribbean and other sites in Latin America.
There is much to appreciate about the stories of life-with-oil in this book. Schields writes that “the sites of intimacy deemed pertinent to the oil economy included not just the regulation of sex but the remaking of sensibilities” (3). Two dimensions of the remaking of intimate sensibilities stood out for me. First, how intimate relations are not limited to the body or the household, as if these locations mirrored “larger” social relations. The closeness and belonging that oil intimacy affords operate both in proximity to and at a distance from bodies and homes, through neocolonial “attachments” (5) crisscrossing the Atlantic and linking internal colonies in the Caribbean with metropolises in Europe, such as “legal pluralisms” (193) regulating things such as sexuality, reproduction, and the right to abode. This geographic sensibility to the simultaneity of isolation and connectivity in the production of intimacy is characteristic of Caribbeanist scholarship, from Michel-Roph Trouillot to Vanessa Agard Jones, where the possibilities for self-affirmation and liberation are linked to the multiscalar politics and poetics of bodies and other “small” places. The second point is about the explosion of intimacy itself, beyond the personal or that which refers to one's most inmost self. Intimacy is a system of relations responding to change and needs, but not only that. Paraphrasing Anne Stoler, to study intimacy is not to turn away from structures of dominance but to relocate their conditions of possibility and relations of production. 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.
