Humanities Brown Bag Seminar

Abstract: This talk concerns the material and conceptual connections between oil and gas prospecting, art finding missions, and archaeological digs conducted in the Algerian Sahara during the 1950s. Resource extraction, especially in a time of decolonization, required a delicate balance between future-oriented economic discourse and competing forms of historicity that alternately buttressed and challenged French state and industry claims to that future and to the past upon which its arguments rested. New media could give those arguments temporal form, but in the meantime, old media resurfaced to disrupt the oil and gas industry's Janus-faced extractive epistemology.