This week on the Chronic, we look at life after oil and explore the cultural politics of a petro-based economy.

Rayanne Tabet’s Season’s Greetings opens with an innocuous Christmas card sent to thousands of employees working for the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company.

“On the front, big bold letters announced the coming holidays and wished them “Seasonʼs Greetings”.

The message on the back read:

“From another plane the camera snaps Taplineʼs DC3 over Sidon terminal showing the floating roof tanks, the executive houses, the golf course and the offices. This is where the pipeline ends and the story of oil begins.

But the story had begun on this hill 10 years earlier on 2 December 1950, when the first drop of Saudi oil arrived in the Mediterranean. And the story ended on the same hill 23 years later, on 28 December 1983, when the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company was dissolved.

The story lasted 33 years, and then the story died. But stories donʼt die. Stories are secrets that hide underground, like oil pipelines, and resurface when the time comes to tell them.”

• Read Season’s Greetings

Jeremy Weate explores the cultural politics of the petro-based economy in Nigeria, where crude as commodity has perpetuated ethnic divides and the illusion of development and modernity through a national pastime of forgetting. He asks: what culture and what memory will be left of oil, after it has gone?

• Read Life After Oil

The apparent demise of the millennia-old Arab cultural centres and the rapid growth, in their place and across all genres, of Emirates-based investment are raising some questions. Is oil money alone fuelling the contemporary art boom, and in whose interests is the cash being flashed in the name of Arab cultural renaissance? Marcia Lynx Qualey explores the possible motives and consequences of moves to the Gulf.

“The Gulf cities promote themselves as stable locales in comparison to their strife-torn neighbours, whose cultural institutions have been badly undermined or almost destroyed. Although Iraqis continue to produce brilliant literature, Baghdad’s book culture has been dealt a series of blows, including an explosion that targeted Al-Mutanabbi Street, its bookselling centre. Damascus’s publishing infrastructure has been largely destroyed, and most of its authors are in exile. In Cairo, the publishing industry has been affected by a new regime intent on making its position clear, including a recent book-burning – targeting texts allegedly associated with the Muslim Brotherhood – at a public library.”

• Read Shifting Gulfwards

António Tomás picks through the post-independence architectural ruins of Angola’s capital city and reveals a cross-section of the economies of exchange and distribution, the relationships of give, take and take again, and the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in a city greased with the “devil’s excrement”.

“Like many other Angolans, Macedo did not occupy only one apartment. He was young and unmarried, but he took four apartments. His estate in this building consisted of one apartment on the first floor, another one on the third, and two more on the fourth. Besides these, he also controlled the little service rooms in the corridors, those spaces that colonial architects had designed for black caretakers. These cubicles, hardly big enough for a single bed, would be in high demand decades later when the city became a hub for speculators. For his part, Macedo would later use these rooms to accommodate family and friends.

As a soldier and an athlete of CODENM (the powerful military sports club), as well as a member of the ruling party, MPLA, Macedo was easily able to amass property.”

• Read Living Dangerously in Petroluanda

For more, head to the Chronic