This chapter reconsiders the road novel, not as a genre of Americanness and the frontier West, but rather as the privileged genre of US hegemony. Specifically, the chapter argues that the road novel does important work in critically mapping the expanding and shifting commodity frontiers of US hegemony, but through the lens and ideologies of automobility and what Matthew Huber has identified as the petro-driven ‘American way of life.’ To illustrate these claims, “Oil, Commodity Frontiers and the Materials of the Road Novel” offers a brief survey of three emblematic road novels that emerged during crucial moments of capitalist transition within the arc of US hegemony: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic western road novel, On the Road (1956) and the petroization of American life, Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (1989), and Samantha Schweblin’s neo-developmentalist soya-frontier road novel, Fever Dreams (2017). Taken together, the chapter reads the road novel as following the arc of US hegemony.

The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.