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Special Issue Articles

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Versions of America: Speculative Pasts, Presents, Futures

"Last Frontier. North to the Future." – Oil-Age Alaska and the Environmental Critique in Mei Mei Evans's Oil and Water

Submitted
October 16, 2024
Published
2025-06-18

Abstract

This article discusses Mei Mei Evans's 2013 novel Oil and Water as a critical response to the competing narratives that have historically shaped three dominant versions of Alaska in the national imagination: as the Last Frontier to be explored, as an enduring frontier promising a balance between resource extraction and environmental protection, and as a wilderness to be preserved. Inspired by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which takes a pivotal place in US environmental history, the novel offers a realistic exploration of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of oil dependency. By dramatizing the spill's devastating impact on both human and more-than-human life, Oil and Water challenges the images of Alaska as a limitless resource frontier and the enduring frontier, while advancing the notion of Alaska as a wilderness to be protected.

References

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