LMN is delighted to announce our first Resisting Mining Book Club of 2026 with guest speaker Ryan Cecil Jobson, who will be speaking about his book The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
About the book:
The Petro-State Masquerade is an historical and ethnographic study of the fraught relationship between fossil fuels and political power in Trinidad and Tobago.
Examining the past, present, and future of Trinidad and Tobago’s oil and gas industries, Ryan Cecil Jobson traces how a model of governance fashioned during prior oil booms is imperiled by declining fossil fuel production and a loss of state control. Despite the twin-island nation’s increasingly volatile and vulnerable financial condition, however, government officials continue to promote it as a land of inexhaustible resources and potentially limitless profits.
The result is what Jobson calls a “masquerade of permanence” whereby Trinbagonian state actors represent the nation as an interminable reserve of hydrocarbons primed for multinational investment. Jobson examines the gulf between this narrative crafted by the postcolonial state and the vexed realities of its dwindling petroleum-fueled aspirations. After more than a century of commercial oil production, Trinidad and Tobago instructs us to regard the petro-state as less a permanent form than a fragile relation between fossil fuels and sovereign authority.
Foregrounding the concurrent masquerades of oil workers, activists, and Carnival revelers, Jobson argues that the promise of decolonization lies in the disarticulation of natural resources, capital, and political power by ordinary people in the Caribbean.
Ryan will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, registered attendees will be sent extracts in advance.
About the author:
Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas, holding the post of Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race and capital. He is Associate Editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology and sits on the editorial boards of Current Anthropology and Small Axe.