Review of The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, by Ryan Cecil Jobson

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024, 240 pp., $115.00 (cloth), ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑226‑83573‑0; $27.50 (paper), ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑226‑83727‑7; $26.99 (eBook), ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑226‑83726‑0.

The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is a provocative and generative work by anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas, Ryan Cecil Jobson. Jobson rethinks the relationship between fossil fuels and sovereign power from the vantage point of the Caribbean. He argues that the petro-state is not a durable political formation but instead a fragile performance, what he calls the “masquerade of permanence,” through which state actors project the illusion of inexhaustible resource wealth and enduring state authority. He contends this masquerade is continually unsettled by what he terms “road work”—insurgent mobilizations, hunger marches, Carnival processions, and protest movements that erupt on the streets and highways of Trinidad. Jobson grounds his analysis in the intellectual and political legacy of C.L.R. James, whose presence reverberates not only through the book’s epigraphs but also in its central conviction that power resides not in state institutions but in the mas of ordinary people. This timely and incisive work compels us to understand the petro-state as a delicate formation, and invites us to consider what futures emerge when its hyphenated structure falls apart.

Jobson employs a creative, multi-layered methodological toolkit of historical ethnography. It affords a lens through which to see Trinidad as a “big small place,” which refuses the limits of a presentist ethnographic imagination. He positions Trinidad as both central and peripheral to world-making processes, extending yet complicating the legacy of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, as well as the broader mobilizations of “small places” in Caribbean Jobson foregrounds the colonial histories encoded in the landscape by rejecting what he calls the “fetish of ethnographic presentism,” which, he argues, assumes that evidence can be secured solely through immediate Echoing Michel‑Rolph Trouillot’s critique of the ethnographic “trinity” of “one observer, one time, one place,” Jobson calls for a historically embedded, multi-scalar ethnographic analysis. To this end, he mobilizes a wide-ranging body of materials that includes archival documents from Trinidad and the Colonial Office Records in Kew, the United Kingdom, oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and Caribbean popular music such as calypso and rapso, to build his historical ethnography of hydrocarbons and sovereign power in Rather than chronologically tracing the development and the transformations of the Trinbagonian oil and gas industry, he concentrates on moments of clash between the state’s masquerade and the people’s masquerade, beginning with the labor uprisings of the 1930s.

The prowess of Jobson’s historical ethnographic method comes to life in the first chapter, “Strike Fever,” which mobilizes a range of data including newspapers like the Trinidad Guardian, colonial telegrams, and interviews with pioneers of the labor movement such as Uriah Butler from the Banyan Archive. Together, these sources trace how the Trinidadian working classes impeded the masquerade of the colonial state and that of its oil barons through strikes, industrial sabotage, seizure of oil company holdings and Crown lands. By focusing on the position of the “mob,” Black workers and Indian laborers unmediated by vanguard political leaders, Jobson shows that in contrast to common accounts that locate the general strike of 1937 as “kernel of postcolonial nationalism” or prelude to independence the labor uprisings, it should be understood as a “general refusal of the In refusing the plantation, he contends, the Trinidadian working class’s political futures became contingent on the futures of fossil

Jobson’s second chapter, “Fueling Independence,” examines how Trinidad’s oil boom financed state-led investments in oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure. He reads Eric Williams’s championing of steel and heavy industry as symbols of postcolonial modernity and economic permanence that enabled the quelling of insurgent opposition. For Jobson, Williams maintains the masquerade of permanence by embracing steel as stable and lasting, unlike the post-1973 volatility of oil. In a compelling example, Jobson illustrates how Williams’s “Go for Steel” gamble propagated a vision of multiracial, post-plantation modernity based on steel’s solidity, yet its dependence on multinational investment exposed the state to international market volatility and technological challenges. In Jobson’s telling, the ensuing cascade of market volatility and technological setbacks exposes the masquerade of permanence for what it really is. Much like metal, the postcolonial state is never the closed system that its leaders presume, it is subject to rust. Indeed, he argues, “metals are not pristine objects that exist in isolation from external pressures; neither is the postcolonial state as independent as it appears to

This otherwise compelling discussion seems to overlook a deep engagement with gender, and in particular the role of women in relation to the dual masquerade. While it is possible that his archive or analytical framework constrained him, Jobson could have deepened his discussion through a dialogue with a scholar such as Cristina Cielo, whose work illuminates the gendered labor that undergirds extractive Instead, Jobson gestures toward masculinist dimensions of the petro-state masquerade. For instance, he shows how Williams deployed the trope of “Caribbean Man” and demonstrates that the transition to heavy industry was framed by Williams as a “consolidation of patriarchal heteronormativity against matrifocal plantation family units of the Yet his analysis of gender is fleeting. The reader is left wondering how patriarchy maintains the petro-state masquerade at large. Moreover, what is the role of women’s (care) work in the petro-state and people’s masquerades? An exploration of the gendered dimensions of both the state and people’s masquerade would have led to a fuller engagement.

In “Deepwater Futures,” Jobson shows how the shift from conventional onshore drilling to unconventional and deepwater frontiers gave way to new performances of the petro-state masquerade. Here, Jobson notes that the post-independence optimism of the nation-state as a vehicle of intervention in economic governance and risk mitigation shifted toward a “valorization of risk,” which relies on technoscientific expertise to unlock ever-deeper Even without successful offshore oil finds, he argues the masquerade persists through seismic surveys, bid rounds, drilling campaigns, and a "temporality of governance" This pivotal chapter coalesces Jobson’s argument about the practice and theory of sovereignty: the enduring production of miracles is the “foundation of sovereignty itself”, he asserts, and the miracle in T&T is the deepwater frontier that promises an exit from “the perils of postcolonial Engaging anthropologies of the state and classical political theory, Jobson asks: “how can sovereignty at once be real and fictive, total and partial, uniform and The answer, he argues, lies in the miracle itself, “which masquerades the fictive as real, the partial as total, and the dispersed as Incomplete political authority masquerades as absolute (e.g., via the miracle of the deepwater frontier), which displaces other visions of mass politics, direct democracy, and challenges to carbon-fueled industrialization.

While the petro-state attempts to consolidate itself as a permanent and indivisible form, “State Building,” chronicles the wave of high-modernist state-funded megaproject investments such as highways and luxury hotels that transformed the Port of Spain skyline during the natural‑gas boom of the 1990s and early 2000s which reveal it to be impermanent and severable. In “Road Work,” Jobson draws on his long-term fieldwork with the Highway Re-route Movement (HRM) to explain the road as a site of “clash,” where residents challenge the state’s masquerade of permanence through disruptions to centralized petro-state bureaucracy and material infrastructures. He advances “road work as a grammar of social criticism” that interrupts the petro-state masquerade and gestures toward what is necessary for the survival of the Caribbean people by ordinary Caribbean people, what he calls the “driving apart the hyphenated This chapter drives home the central point in Jobson’s theory of the state: that the state is a contested relation, not a solidified form. The chapter centers the people’s mas, their own masquerade, and builds on Trinbagonian visual artist reading of “roadworks”, as a “dynamic practice of popular subversion”, that goes beyond the revolution as a singular event of rupture and . In the coda, “Play a Mas”, Jobson extends this artful subversion of road work to consider how the strikes, hunger marches, occupations, and the Carnival road march itself contains the potential for ordinary citizens “to stage alternative political futures for the Caribbean in an epoch of carbon-driven climate ”. Returning to where he began, with the “evangelist” CLR James, as George Lamming describes him, Jobson emphasizes that power is from below— “power lies in the ”.

Jobson’s Petro‑state Masquerade offers an inspired synthesis of methodological ambition, theoretical acuity, and political urgency. His “big small place” viewpoint insists on deep historical excavation while tracing the global entanglements of Trinidad and Tobago’s oil economy. In doing so, he demonstrates what a rigorously historicized ethnography can achieve when it refuses the “fetish of ethnographic presentism.” The Petro-state Masquerade provides enormous contributions to a range of disciplines, including (political) anthropology, Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, historical sociology, geography, political philosophy, political ecology and critical theory. Each chapter advances a carefully composed argument. Step by step, with careful and precise diction, he exposes the petro-state’s masquerade of permanence that is continually unsettled by the insurgent “people’s mas.”

If Fernando Coronil’s The Magical State showed how oil stitched the two halves of a hyphenated petro-state, Jobson’s remarkable monograph demonstrates how within the same geology, though a different moment and scale, this seam is a masquerade produced by state actors and multinational technocrats. Jobson reveals how everyday people continually unravel this suture. With analytical clarity, he illuminates a rich conceptualization of the category sovereignty from the His brief engagement with the petro‑state’s emergent claim to hints at, but does not fully excavate, how carbon‑constrained futures threaten to unravel the masquerade of permanence. Future research may ask: How will the state retrofit its masquerade in the face of escalating climate catastrophe? How may “road work” unsettle this masquerade and enact futures disarticulated from the petro-state? Jobson shows us that the refusal of the plantation relied on an enmeshment among the future of the Trinidadian working classes, the Trinbagonian state, and the future of extractive fossil fuels. Importantly, he shows how the people’s mas prises open space to envision and enact a future of direct democracy, self-provisioning, and self‑determination. Jobson’s final provocation calls for intellectuals to defend and ultimately evangelize the ongoing people’s masquerade: “Let the heathen rage. Don’t stop the ”.

About the Reviewer

Anna Feign is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.