Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

It is an opinion widely held that mass-consumerism is eradicating difference across the globe in the interests of big business. This is a gross simplification—a closer look at one of the most visible global brands reveals how consumerism brings homogeneity, but also propagates difference in inequality.

When the world’s addiction to oil is so intimately tied to such seismic historical movements as the Iraq War, Deepwater Horizon and climate change, one may question its relativity to literature. But it is in no sense spurious. So, let’s pull away from the centripetal force of these world-historical moments briefly. For then we can detect in literary products from the highly-prized to the largely-forgotten the wholesale, yet quotidian, transformations of ways of life, cultures, and societies that is concurrent with the use of oil.

As the dust settles on ‘Camp Hope’, I am drawn back to those hours when the rescue was reaching its final stages, and to the news coverage which, like over a billion others, I watched hoping for the best. A closer look at the way in which this world event was represented, and the implications of this representation, makes for some unsettlingly revealing (re)viewing.