Overview

In this highly original work, historian Chelsea Schields illuminates how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Offshore Attachments reveals that, from boom to bust, Caribbean people challenged and embraced efforts to alter intimate behaviors in service of the energy economy, molding the industry from the ground up. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.

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9780520390805

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Reviews

""The book…is grounded in impressive, multi-archival, and multilingual research showcasing a wide range of primary sources that include local publications, personal recollections, oral interviews, governmental papers, and private companies’ studies and reports.""   * H-Net Reviews * ""This account of twentieth-century oil production in the Dutch Caribbean historicizes the making of the oil industry, but also historicizes the making of racialization and of sexual practices and mores."" * Logos *  ""Schield's book makes a noteworthy contribution to the field of  Caribbean History. Providing rich opportunities to account for the historicity of such seemingly innate and transparent categories as race and sexuality."" * Journal of Caribbean History * ""Offshore Attachments is an ambitious exploration of two understudied Caribbean islands and the role they played on a global stage."" * New West Indian Guide *

""The book…is grounded in impressive, multi-archival, and multilingual research showcasing a wide range of primary sources that include local publications, personal recollections, oral interviews, governmental papers, and private companies’ studies and reports.""   * H-Net Reviews * ""This account of twentieth-century oil production in the Dutch Caribbean historicizes the making of the oil industry, but also historicizes the making of racialization and of sexual practices and mores."" * Logos *  ""Schield's book makes a noteworthy contribution to the field of  Caribbean History. Providing rich opportunities to account for the historicity of such seemingly innate and transparent categories as race and sexuality."" * Journal of Caribbean History * ""Offshore Attachments is an ambitious exploration of two understudied Caribbean islands and the role they played on a global stage."" * New West Indian Guide * ""The book documents intimacy vis-à-vis the global oil industry to remind us of how desire, racism, and sex continue to operate via offshore attachments well after the bust of the oil industry, e.g., in the current arrangements and organization of the tourism and leisure industry and in the Caribbean diaspora in Europe. It does so in an accessible form, through careful discourse and archival analysis, a Black feminist sensitivity, and the vantage point of two small islands in the Caribbean."" * The Americas *

"""The book…is grounded in impressive, multi-archival, and multilingual research showcasing a wide range of primary sources that include local publications, personal recollections, oral interviews, governmental papers, and private companies’ studies and reports.""   * H-Net Reviews * ""This account of twentieth-century oil production in the Dutch Caribbean historicizes the making of the oil industry, but also historicizes the making of racialization and of sexual practices and mores."" * Logos *"

Author Information

Chelsea Schields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

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