Hydrocarbon Genre:

The Oil Encounter in Abdel Munif’s Cities of Salt and Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

Abstract

This paper analyzes Abdel Munif’s Cities of Salt and Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason as illustrations of the ‘Hydrocarbon Genre.’ These novels narrate the socio-cultural-economic and ecological implications of the oil business on the Arab world. Munif and Ghosh, in these works, expose the dark underside of the petro-capitalist takeover of the Middle East. They not only point out the complicity of the Gulf’s elite in the resultant crisis but also delve in detail into the various forms of resistance to the new petro-capitalist order. This paper further attempts to establish these novels as a subversive retendering of the oil encounter from a marginalized native’s and an excluded migrant’s perspective