“Stop the Oil!”: Narrative Energetics and the Political Ecology of Strikes

Abstract

This chapter explores moments of crisis and conflict in frontier zones in the form of industrial unrest. My particular interest is in the literary registration of the general strikes in Britain (1926) and Trinidad (1937). The General Strike in Britain was precipitated by conflict over working conditions in the coal industry, that in Trinidad by unrest in the oilfields. These confrontations, I argue, represent an effort by working-class people to radically transform the ecologies of the coal and oil frontiers by seizing control of the flows of energy through which they operate. Focusing on Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash and Ralph de Boissiere’s Crown Jewel, I connect the narrative energetics of these texts to the socioecological energetics of strikes. In re-making (or re-energizing) dominant generic models, both novels encode resistant or utopian visions of the transformation of the life- and environment-making logic of the commodity frontier.