Violent Ecotropes

The Niger Delta, the crude oil extraction center of Nigeria, features in the global public imagination as the archetypal theatre of oil production. Much is made of the spectacle of violence in this region: environmental devastation, local community protests and youth violence on account of the perceived injustice associated with the oil extractive industrial complex. The involvement of a global cartel of oil smuggling from this region, known as bunkering, which fuels and finances local militancy, which in turn exacerbates the atmosphere of violence in this beleaguered oilscape, is yet another problem associated petroculture in this region. However, little is discussed about the effects of these activities on local life, the ways in which violence has itself become ontological, shaping local existence in a variety of ways. Analyzing a number of contemporary texts across genres – poetry, film, short video performances, and photographs – this book offers a new interpretation of petro- violence beyond its materially-based response to crude extraction. The study reads violence as also metonymic devices employed in representations of oil ontology, the lived reality in the Niger River Delta. Underpinning the book are three key research questions aimed at critically understanding the culture of oil extraction in this oilscape: - (1) it rethinks the domain of representation, in terms of the imaginative possibilities that frame attempts at representing oil in culture;
- (2) it reconceptualises place regarding the complexities of engaging the globalised infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction from the specificity of locally lived ecologies; and
- (3) it reframes the environmental challenges that carbon-based civilisation poses to local landscapes as concrete instances of anthropogenic global warming, without getting lost in the globalising logic and abstracting scientism that frame climate change discourse
. Together they constitute significant factors that shape and are shaped by oil energy and the global circuits within which it travels to feed international consumption. Nevertheless, in writing to the universality—albeit a fraught one—of extractive neoliberalism, the book argues that the narratives of oil in the Niger Delta constitute a "hermeneutics of locality," one that vivify the environmental challenges of our time to be a profound actuality of place.