The Sound of All Water: Petro-Culture and Black Modernity in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

s fossil fuels have become increasingly necessary for life in the Anthropocene, their pervasiveness has led to changes in social experience and artistic representation, foregrounding mobility, acceleration, and the entanglement of the spectacular with the horrific. Petrocritic Imre Szeman asserts that “access to petrocarbon structures contemporary social life on a global scale” (138), making all culture essentially petroculture. The transition into this petroculture began in the midnineteenth century with the rise of oil in the United States, a change in energy regime that shifted what fueled modern society from living muscle power―beasts of burden and enslaved humans―to much more forceful nonliving power―petroleum formed from the bodies of longdead creatures. Because the energy readily available was so unprecedented, and because its rise was roughly contemporaneous with the legal emancipation of enslaved Africans, oil is often compared with its energy predecessor. The power in a gallon of oil is cited by Frederick Buell as “the equivalent of fifty ‘wellfed human slaves toiling all day’” (283). Andrew Nikiforuk argues that for a world where empires had run on slave power for millennia, it only became possible to conceive of abolition after “mechanical slaves . . . eliminated the need for widespread S A R A S T E P H E N S L O O M I S