For You Humanity! Socialist Oil Imaginaries in Azerbaijani Art

Fowkes, Maja ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9403-5527 and Fowkes, Reuben ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7027-5630 (2027) For You Humanity! Socialist Oil Imaginaries in Azerbaijani Art. In: Revolutionary Drills: Art and Extractivism in the Socialist Anthropocene. Amsterdam University Press. (In Press)

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

Representations of the infrastructures and processes of extraction, portrayals of the workers who manned the derricks and rigs, as well as artistic reflection on the social achievements of the oil industry delineate the contours of a distinctively socialist form of petroculture in Soviet Azerbaijan. Socialist art and visual culture, across the media of film, photography, graphics, paintings and public monuments, can also be tapped to uncover the mythogenesis of socialist oil drilling, since artists and filmmakers were on hand to document and memorialize the heroic drama of extraction from the struggle to surge production to meet the needs of a rapidly industrializing planned economy in the 1930s to the second Golden Age of Azerbaijani oil in the 1960s. In later decades, as the attention of planners and propagandists turned to the “second Baku” of Perm in the Urals, artists broached the question of the social and environmental costs of oil extraction. At issue here is how the corporeality of oil drilling was made visible in socialist art as a struggle with the elements, the ways in which visions of an oil-fuelled social transformation were articulated in art practice, and the extent to which the visual culture of Soviet Azerbaijan sheds light on the specificities of the socialist model of extractivism.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Art History and World Art Studies
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	02 Nov 2026 09:58
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2026 09:58
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104948
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item