2026 Theses Doctoral

Culture Slick: The Nation, the Text, and the Multinational Corporation

MacPherson, Evelyn A.

This dissertation explores the cultural productions of multinational oil corporations during the mid-twentieth century. Through three case studies, I suggest that oil corporations incorporated culture, and literature in particular, into their broader strategies of extraction.

Moving from The Shell Guides to the British Counties of the 1930s, to Ian Fleming’s failed manuscript for the Kuwait Oil Company in 1960, and finally to Creole Petroleum’s Venezuelan magazine El Farol during a particularly impactful period from 1948 to 1958, I trace how the corporation allied itself to national culture during an epoch defined by imperial decline, decolonization movements, and the rise of neo-imperialism.

I use Graeme Macdonald’s provocation that resources appear “explicitly registered, unconsciously abstracted or sedimented into a text’s form and content,” as an invitation to consider how oil appears as both content and structural apparatus in the works produced and patronized by oil conglomerates. In turn, I suggest that these texts shape how we interpret preexisting works of national literature through the political and cultural economies of the “oil complex,” a term borrowed from Arbella Bet-Shlimon.

Ultimately, this project interrogates how multinational oil corporations manipulated one of the central paradoxes of oil, its abundance and simultaneous invisibility in the cultural imagination, to moor the corporation to national communities and their consumer base, even as the corporation enacted irreparable harm.