American Oil Encounter: On Jung Yun’s “O Beautiful”

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“Try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable,” writes Amitav Ghosh in his foundational essay “Petrofiction” on Abdelrehman Munif’s Cities of Salt, in which Ghosh first proposed petrofiction as a term and genre to read representations of oil in fiction. In the same essay, shortly after, he goes on to write: “As one of the few people who have tried to write about the floating world of oil, I can bear witness to its slipperiness, to the ways in which it tends to trip fiction into incoherence.” First published in 1992, this review of Munif’s novel has since become foundational in framing how we understand how oil is represented, and its lack of representation too, as Ghosh articulates here. Building on this framing of the “slipperiness” of oil, Ghosh also proposes that the monolingual nature of fiction in the United States limits what oil can do. 

 In the years since Ghosh first published this review, the field of petrofiction has grown, as Ghosh articulates in his essay “Petrofiction, Revisited,” written in 2018: “Over the last fifteen years there has been an enormous outpouring of fiction and nonfiction on subjects that are related in one way or another to the oil encounter: the war in Iraq, the war on terror, September 11, the Muslim experience in America, and so on.” Despite being written over two decades after his first definition of petrofiction, in this framing, Ghosh once again centers the oil encounter as something between nation-states and larger regions, to a degree: the relationship between the United States and the Middle East is the relationship of the oil encounter. The “oil encounter” becomes something that can only be understood on a global scale, becomes the way to understand violences of capital that are enacted by the nation state abroad. 

Asian American novelist Jung Yun’s O Beautiful,  in its documentation of oil in the rural landscapes of America, allows us a way to read and represent oil in fiction, despite what Ghosh calls its “slipperiness.”  The novel tracks mixed-race journalist Elinor as she reports on the oil boom in the small town of Avery in the Bakken in North Dakota, two hours away from where she grew up.  Elinor, a monolingual child of a Korean mother and a white American father stationed in Korea, in her position on the peripheries of this predominantly white region, challenges Ghosh’s premise of both the “slipperiness” of oil and of the impossibility of an American writer “taking on the Oil Encounter.” 

In Yun’s positionality as an Asian American writer engaging with questions of belonging, nation-making, and the local landscapes of oil within boundaries of the nation state as a whole, the oil encounter can be made visible in the novel, even as it remains shifting, always in flux; in its triangulation of the relationships between indigeneity, Asian-ness, and whiteness in the landscapes of the United States as central to reading oil, O Beautiful challenges how the oil encounter has historically been read and written, bringing the local into conversation with the global to redraw the geographies of oil and its representations.

Through this engagement with the peripheries of American-ness, Yun’s O Beautiful allows us to understand petrofiction as Ghosh defines it in the geographies and landscapes of the US—Yun herself, an Asian American writer, exists in some ways on the peripheries of what is historically canonized as ‘American’ literature; oil and its relationships to capital can only be conceived of from the peripheries of American empire. In O Beautiful, oil is America and America is oil. While Elinor’s upbringing in the region and the fraught sense of national belonging it produces for her predates the oil boom, oil becomes central to the way Elinor understands America as affect. Over the course of the novel, oil becomes visible to her  as a shared affinity that forecloses national belonging for anyone who falls outside the settler colonial fantasy of America as an expanse marked by absence. O Beautiful, in its examination of Elinor’s own identity as an Asian woman, of Asian racialization in relation to oil in the US makes visible the way oil is foundational to America as it imagines itself, how it opens up belonging to some and closes off to others, how it offers particular ways of engaging with capital in relation to the world.

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Following a difficult upbringing in the region after her mother Nami left the family, Elinor, after high school left her father and sister Maren behind to move to New York, where she worked as a model and then attended graduate school for journalism. During graduate school, Elinor begins a relationship with her professor Richard; at the beginning of the novel, the relationship has long since ended, but Richard is the one who offers Elinor the assignment to write about the oil boom, sending her his notes and scaffolding for the article as a whole. 

The novel opens with Elinor returning to North Dakota, where she’d spent most of her childhood, the daughter of a white man who was in the military, who had met his wife, Nami, Elinor’s mother, in Korea. This parental dynamic, sustained in the landscapes of North Dakota, is inseparable from Elinor’s experience of this place—all this being history that predates the oil boom. On her arrival, she notes the presence of a gas station that carries the “cheapest gas in town”; this brief aside flags oil as central to how this book reads the slipperiness of national belonging. Oil is now the way capital functions here in the Bakken, a distinct shift from Elinor’s past experience of the region.

Yun writes too, early on: “In Avery, North Dakota, the epicenter of the North American oil boom, one might forget that the rest of the country is still struggling to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Avery, in this framing is situated then, partly, outside of time—history is not the same here, and oil makes this so. Stephanie LeMenager, in their monograph Living Oil writes of how oil functions that: “Today, oil itself lives at a worldwide set of current and historical extraction sites that might work as ‘lieux de memoire’…places that call up memories that may or may not correspond to actual histories (LeMenager 142).” Here, drawing from Pierre Nora’s term, LeMenager’s conception of the global networks of oil is useful in considering how place functions in relation to O Beautiful and specifically to Avery—in Avery’s abundance, it almost becomes removed from the larger history of the US, but also a place that carries in it the larger histories of the US. Oil is Avery’s means of transcending the economic limitations that face the rest of America. Elinor situates the changes in Avery since the last time she was here, in North Dakota, framing it as a utopia of sorts, economically: “thousands of itinerant oil workers from recession ravaged parts of the country, descending upon a town of four thousand that was unprepared to take them in.” Avery, in Elinor’s understanding, has become a microcosm of the American dream, in a sense—it becomes the place where oil makes the imagination possible. Mobility is possible here, a promise of the future not marked by precarity, but instead by abundance, the possibilities oil carries.

Frederick Buell’s “A Short History of Oil Cultures, or The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance” also proves useful in reading O Beautiful as a central example of how we might read and write the oil encounter in the United States; considering the tensions of ‘exuberance’ and ‘catastrophe’ as he frames them, Buell writes of oil: “Stability seems to be completely gone—gone simultaneously in a runaway dynamism of exuberance and catastrophe.” This framing of stability replaced by a constantly shifting extreme  helps consider the language of the oil ‘boom’ that is central to how Elinor read tensions of gender and race in Avery.

Elinor’s cultural understanding of the boom comes largely from reading articles; Yun writes: “Then, the boom dropped what one writer memorably described as a ‘diversity bomb’ on the Western Dakotas. Suddenly, job seekers of every race and ethnicity were arriving in the area. Upon first read, she thought ‘bomb’ was a nice bit of descriptive flourish to account for the scale and suddenness of the changes, but now it occurs to her that bombs destroy things. Bombs are never good.” Here, this phrasing emphasizes the tensions of race that are central to how oil is experienced in North Dakota. The utopic promise of oil as a means to capital and abundance consequently leads to  mass migration to the region. ‘Bomb’ then, as Elinor understands it, becomes a way of signaling tensions incited by such movements, intentionally or unintentionally so. Abundance necessitates violence here, in Elinor’s reading of how this situation is understood by the dominant narrative frameworks of whiteness in North Dakota. Here, in how white people frame the increase in racial diversity since the oil boom, there is also a foreclosure of solidarity that might exist. This foreclosure becomes particularly visible in the relationship between Avery and the Mahua nation in the region, which is central to Avery’s cultural imagination of itself. 

Shortly after, Yun writes of Elinor’s considerations of oil in this landscape as she interviews a woman whose house shares a property-line with a drilling site: 

“In other parts of the country, the whole point of fracking is to access natural gas, which people often pay a fortune for to heat their homes. But here in the Bakken it’s the crude oil they want. The gas is just a byproduct, the waste they burn off into the atmosphere because there’s not a pipeline in place to transport it yet.”

Here the sense of abundance comes sharply into focus—there is something indulgent here, something obscene, almost, in its abundance. Gas, a greatly desired commodity, becomes waste, situating oil as a site deeply intertwined with the mechanisms of empire that devalue certain subjects and ways of existing in the world. In her attunement to the unique ways that the financial machinations of oil in North Dakota shape its social tensions, the novel becomes deeply concerned with how to narrativize the presence of oil in the US, making this geography a microcosm of America’s relationship with other parts of the world, the ongoing exploitations, the inability to read oil without considering the nation of the United States. The ability to read oil, as Yun understands it, is central in how it might allow us to read anew larger social structures that make the United States and its hegemonic global influences. Thinking back to Ghosh’s framing of the impossibility of reading and writing the oil encounter, O Beautiful here is central in how it offers us ways to read the oil encounter within the boundaries of the United States, reading, alongside other global scales of oil. By reading oil into this isolated landscape, where as Elinor notes, there’s “not a pipeline in place to transport it yet,” Yun allows us new ways of understanding global movements of oil through this microcosm. The oil encounter, elusive as it is, can be pinned down here in reading it from the peripheries.

During her time in Avery, Elinor sets up an interview with a local police officer, Officer Peterson, who Elinor notes discusses the oil boom in ways that make her uncomfortable in how they indicate his own understandings of race and how it functions in this geography; Yun writes: “But the way [Officer Peterson] talks about the boom—like it was a switch that suddenly flipped on and changed everything—doesn’t sit right with her.” Once again taking us back to the moment where Elinor considers the phrasing of “diversity bomb,” here Yun underscores the casual violence of language in North Dakota, in Avery, an easy dismissiveness of any concerns as caused by race, an inattentiveness to the way the promise of oil and wealth functions here in relation to whiteness. When Officer Peterson claims there’s been an increase in violent crime since the oil boom, Elinor thinks that “this is similar to what she said to Lydia, which is similar to what the town manager said to her. But repeating a falsehood over and over again doesn’t make it true.” In this moment, we see how oil is deeply intertwined now with how Avery understands itself—oil is the mechanism by which narrative is made here: oil is the American Dream, creating a split between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ as dominant narratives of Avery understand the distinctions between the two. 

The shift in the novel from the documentative witnessing of petrofiction as a mode to imagine a space of solidarity based on shared racialized and gendered experiences of the Bakken takes place through the framework of Elinor’s assignment, as it exists. About a third of the way in, Elinor begins to feel apprehension about the story she is working on. Elinor thinks of her research upon her arrival: “But she can’t shake the feeling that Richard has pitched her down the wrong path, and a story about the oil boom creating a schism between insiders and outsiders is just too simplistic for the mess that Avery really is.” This undercurrent of race as a means to determine insiders and outsiders becomes peripheral, a reductive way of reading race relations in North Dakota, almost separated from the machinations of oil in the region, how it works to create communities of nuanced racialized and gendered relationships. 

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Upon arriving in Avery, Elinor finds herself immediately cast in a gendered subjectivity, one that casts her as an object. Fear becomes a central affect in her experience of place—an undercurrent that shapes her interactions with men in this landscape. As visibly Asian in a place where there are few Asian people, Elinor is hyper visible, marked  both by gender and race, with no community solidarity. The only other Asian woman who might have a shared experience of Avery is her mother Nami, who has long since left, leaving perpetual absence in her wake.

Yun writes of Elinor’s own grappling with herself of the way gender functions in North Dakota: “She reminds herself she has a job to do in spite of these men, who are everywhere in Avery. She has to be able to walk among them.” Here, the sense created is that of claustrophobia for Elinor, with the phrasing of “walking among them,” Elinor evoked as the only woman in this envisioning of “everywhere.”  She feels a sense of isolation compounded by race. The oil boom brings men here, and in turn, the threat of violence towards women, and especially women of color, increases. Later, while Elinor is leaving a diner, Yun writes: “Only when the line of men disappears from her rearview mirror does she notice the way she’s sitting—perfectly erect, both hands squeezing the steering wheel, her knuckles bloody and white.” The space of the car, within the larger expansive landscape allows us to read this experience as claustrophobic; Elinor does not actively notice how she is sitting in the space of the car. Her car, with its material boundaries from the external world, becomes a space that Elinor feels safer in, but the affect of fear still seeps through, impacting how she drives, how she sits in the car. Here, fear takes on a bodily sense— a larger threat of violence that makes its place clear, becomes visible in a way reminding her she is not in New York. 

This hyper visibility is also central to Elinor’s shift in career from originally leaving home at eighteen to be a model. Modeling is what has allowed her a degree of stability in the otherwise precarious life of a freelance journalist—her savings from her modeling career have paid for her apartment; stable housing makes precarity possible here. Modeling also is central to considering the way visibility functions in Elinor’s experience of the world, both professionally in North Dakota, and the unwanted object making of her person in North Dakota. Modeling makes her visible as Asian; of her identity as both white and Asian, Elinor says: “For eighteen years, she lived in North Dakota, surrounded by white people who didn’t think she was white. Then, she moved to New York, where the Asians she met didn’t accept her as Asian, disconnected as she was from that part of her identity.” Being looked at, then, provides a way for Elinor to become visible. Modeling becomes a resistance to perceptions of her identity, making her visible as a racialized person, as someone who necessarily must be identified, despite being cast as an outsider. Early on, she writes: “Attention was a valuable form of currency. The more she earned, the more she was worth. Now all she wants is to blend in, something that’s proving impossible here.” Being looked at is tied to a material gain in New York; here, it becomes coded with the implication of gendered violence. Here, in a landscape of predominantly white people increasingly unhappy about the diversification of the area, Elinor’s visibility is also coded with racialized violence—the idea that her presence itself might result in bodily harm. In addition, her role as a journalist is also central to how she is made visible while also desiring invisibility. Elinor must both remain an outsider– not herself part of the tensions that are building in Avery, but also must center her claims to this landscape in order to convince the locals, who are all resistant to outsiders entering their landscape, to talk to her. 

From the outset, Elinor is both the racialized other and the complicit subject;  in her childhood as the only Asian children in her town along with her sister Maren, Elinor notes that “whenever [Elinor and Maren’s] classmates turned their attention to the Sioux or Mahua girls, they’d both join in gladly, so grateful not to be on the receiving end of the name calling for a chance.” Elinor, distanced from the version of herself that grew up in North Dakota, the immediacy of the landscape of racialized harm to her and her sister, is able to recognize her own complicity in furthering harm to the Mahua girls. 

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Haunting Elinor from the moment of her arrival is Leanne Lowell, a white woman from the region who went missing. Leanne is first mentioned in an early interview with a local, and is also a part of the research that Richard has passed on to her. Elinor observes early on that Leanne, a blonde, white woman, is granted much more space in the narrativization of gendered violence in Avery, despite the numerous Indigenous women who have gone missing in the area. As she continues working on the story, everywhere she turns, Leanne crops up, a central part of the way gender is now understood in Avery. 

Leanne, then, becomes the means through which Elinor finds solidarity with Indigenous women in the region. For her research, Elinor has a meeting arranged with the chairman of the Mahua Nation, but Elinor arrives late and hungover from a night of drinking with her sister Maren, a fact that is remarked upon by Shawnalee, the chairman’s assistant. After Elinor asks Shawnalee about Leanne Lowell, she betrays a complicity with whiteness as she too centers Leanne, despite her awareness of the Mahua women and girls who have gone missing. Her relationship with Shawnalee then is necessarily fraught with this tension of Elinor’s complicity with whiteness—one which Elinor is aware of, but cannot extricate herself from. 

In her interest in Leanne’s disappearance, Elinor also brings up this case when discussing her desire to shift the focus of the article with Lydia, her editor. “Lydia gave Elinor an opportunity to write a story, nearly any story of her choosing, about women in the Bakken. And the one she keeps circling back to is the one that everyone has already been conditioned to care about,” writes Yun.  Here, Elinor, much like her earlier moment of recognition of her own complicity, is aware of the problematic tensions of once again centering whiteness in narratives of North Dakota and the Bakken—there are significantly compounded fears of the intersections of race and gender, that might be more productive for her to center, as someone who has experienced this geography herself as a racial outsider. 

At one point, after a tense interpersonal encounter with the manager of the hotel Elinor has booked a room in for her two weeks in Avery, she finds herself with no place to stay, and is informed of a truck stop where she can park her car and sleep. Here, a couple Elinor meets help her set up interviews with women oil workers willing to talk to Elinor about their work, about their experiences of gender and race in Avery’s oil economy. At the opening of this, Elinor articulates her desired shift in focus for her article as: “It has to be about women—the ones who come to the Bakken looking for something.” Here, Elinor centers opportunity, the promise of abundance, which in many cases offers a potentiality of transcending race and gender—the idea that the only thing that might matter might be relationship to oil, and thereby to wealth, which  will allow these women an equal national belonging.

In her interviews with the women, Elinor notes that their body language tenses up when asked about male coworkers; Yun writes of their perspectives: “A few of the women feel so good about the money they’re earning, they claim they can ignore the harassment they’re often subjected to, while others can barely describe the conditions they work under without pausing to collect themselves.” This collective summarization of these interviews Elinor conducts is central to how Elinor herself reads gender—opportunity, for some of these women, transcends the ways in which it might be dangerous to experience the world, but this tension is not framed as against gendered solidarities; it becomes instead one way of experiencing this landscape. The other end of the spectrum of these interviews is the lasting impact the harassment these women face has on their lives—the ways it affectively manifests in their bodies as they speak with Elinor. But Elinor also notes that: “two common threads connect every woman she talks to. They all came to the Bakken to find opportunities they couldn’t find elsewhere. And they’re all angry about things that feel out of their control.” Here, once again, the negative affects necessitated by working in the oil industry are centered—anger is the prominent emotional experience of these spaces.

The ending of the novel is a moment that brings the two arcs of this novel—that of North Dakota as a landscape ripe for documenting the “oil encounter” of petrofiction, and that of gender and race as creating unique experiences of oil in relation to nation, belonging, and global networks of connectivity. Elinor is in movement, at the end—nothing reaches a concrete conclusion, remaining instead vague and ambiguous, perhaps reflective of the “oil encounter” itself; impossible to pin down, oil remains fluid, allowing for multiplicity. 

Of the racial tensions that dominate this landscape that have grown more and more fraught as years have passed since Elinor lived in this geography, she thinks: “It’s hard to reconcile how these truths can even occupy the same place. That’s probably why this land means so much to her. It’s a reminder of how complicated this country is, how great beauty and terrible ugliness have coexisted here from the start.” Abundance and economy, beauty and ugliness, and, as Buell notes, “catastrophe and exuberance”—North Dakota becomes a geography of contradiction in this moment, able to hold both the local and the national. In this representation, despite its elusiveness, contradiction can hold oil; in Elinor’s recognition of that contradiction, she can finally begin to represent it. Without recognition, oil will forever remain elided in histories of the Bakken despite how central it is to how race is understood in the area. In holding the local and the national, alongside the international through Elinor’s parents meeting in Korea, oil can be written. Through the superimposition of these landscapes onto each other through all that Elinor is and holds, we might begin to understand how to write and read oil, how central it is to understanding our experiences of the world, how deeply it shapes both the global and the local.

At the very end, we leave Elinor in a moment of clarity—a sharpness and focus to her thinking that has been crystallizing so far; Yun writes: “It’s not about the women who arrive in this hard and unforgiving place, looking for something better. It’s about the ones who were always here and chose to stay.” In this moment, Elinor, despite her interviews, which have given her a new respect for and understanding of the solidarities oil might engender, recognizes with a startling focus of vision that her article, moving from the oil boom to gender and oil and finally, indigeneity alongside gender and oil. Implied here, in the phrasing of the “ones who were always here” is what has been the undercurrent of settler colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous people, one that continues into the present day in this geography, with significantly more Mahua women going missing than white women—Leanne, a story of individual experience is no longer central; instead, the structural tensions of race and settler colonialism are centered, making visible violences that have been casually elided in historical narratives of North Dakota and the broader United States. 

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O Beautiful, in its portrayal of the oil boom of North Dakota, positions Asian American literature, and other canons of literature from the peripheries of what has historically been understood as American literature, as a tradition through which what Ghosh calls the ‘oil encounter’ might be documented and borne witness too in American literature. Through Elinor’s dual unbelonging and belonging, the tensions of whiteness and Asianness at play within her experience of the world, the novel manages to make visible the way oil functions to document larger histories of American-ness, focusing in particular on race and gender through its considerations of Indigeneity. Through focusing on Elinor, Yun manages to bring us to a shaky solidarity by the end of the novel, a solidarity that comes with a productive new understanding of what it might be to exist in relation to other, relationships marked by oil. 

In reading O Beautiful, oil is made central to reading racialization in the present day, making the landscape central to gendered and racialized relationships. Oil and America become  mirrors, a way for Elinor to finally understand, tangibly, what solidarity and belonging might mean. 

Oil becomes not only something that American empire constructs just abroad as Ghosh frames it, but instead equally a way of constructing racialized and gendered subjecthood in the United States, a foundational relationship to American capitalism and empire. Elinor, as a racialized Other, thinking through her own complex positionality in relation to Indigenous womanhood, becomes a framework through which these tensions are made visible, no longer elided in service of a history of the US that frames oil as contemporary. Oil is no longer just a development in global histories of industrialization; instead, oil is a way to read anew histories of the social tensions that shape how nationhood is understood in the United States. North Dakota, Elinor comes to understand, is both a macrocosm of her family and a microcosm of the United States, becoming a way for her, and us, to read both the global and the local. America’s racial tensions are mirrored in North Dakota’s racial tensions, which are in turn mirrored in Elinor’s family. There is no way to read any geography–nation, state, city– without constantly being aware of the ways oil, despite its material invisibility, makes its presence known in even the social landscapes of any geography it touches. Oil and America are inextricably intertwined, the same in many ways.