Adventures in Oil

Fifty-five years ago at a New Year’s Eve party for Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) employees in Kirkuk, Miss Khalida Asad - the daughter of an Oil Police commandant - came dressed as “IPC” and won a prize for the “most original” dress (pictured above). Reporting on the event for Iraq Petroleum Magazine, Anne Kitchen lauds Miss Asad for the “great ingenuity and imagination” that went into her creative ensemble.

Creative, bold, and kitschy as Miss Asad’s outfit may be, this image serves more importantly to illustrate an important point about the hegemony of IPC in the Middle East during this period. The “imagination” represented in this attention-getting design is akin to the powerful visual language that IPC used to establish an “imagined community” through the circulation of its popular company periodicals in the 1950s.

Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that the advent of print-capitalism, i.e. mass circulation of periodicals to disparate and heterogenous national populations, has been fundamental to the construction of national identity. Similarly, IPC circulated magazines and diaries intended to reach employees and readers in all parts of the Middle East, in order to construct a sense of belonging to the “imagined community” of the Iraq Petroleum Company.

Here, a young Iraqi woman is literally attempting to embody the petroleum company by pasting visual references to the IPC onto her body. The strong visual language developed by IPC is easily recognizable in Asad’s dress. Regional maps with dotted lines marking the route of pipelines and oil tankers compose the pattern of fabric, while the iconic rig and bar graph indicating increasing company profits & production of oil barrels adorn her head and shoulders.

This visual language of mapping the Middle East, imagines the region as the territory of the petroleum company; thus locating, identifying, including and excluding certain local populations within that reinscribed geography as part of an IPC community. Violent practices of mapping and the writing of history is most often examined in terms of the nation-state (see Craib 2004). However, in the case of Iraq and other petroleum-producing countries it is also important to continue considering how the Petroleum Company, worked in parallel, in cooperation, or perhaps in competition with individual nation-states of the Middle East, to determine the boundaries of belonging: who to include and who to leave out, and similarly in the writing of official national and/or company history, what remember and what to forget.

Image Source: Kitchen, Anne. 1954. News from Our Middle East Locations: Kirkuk. Iraq Petroleum 3 (7): 38.