Subversive text as dystopian negative: speculative gesture, prophetic rhetoric, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

Abstract

This paper connects a crucial use of rhetoric in activist texts of the past 175 years to a similar rhetorical structure in the arts. In causes such as African decolonization, Black liberation, revolutionary socialism, and ecocriticism, activist texts vehemently expose injustice and turn swiftly at the end toward emancipatory possibility. Using Fred Moten’s concept of prophesy, I read this rhetorical structure as a vital intervention in the imaginary of the future possible, and I use the term “dystopian negative” to describe artistic uses of this rhetoric. In my reading of Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, I examine how the dystopian negative rejects the alarmism of dystopian narratives, gesturing instead to possible alternatives. Interpreting this gesture as a call to audiences to participate actively in building better futures, this article queries the role of the audience in the interpretive field of dissident expression.

Keywords:

• Niger Delta
• petrofiction
• dystopia
• activism
• Helon Habila

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In a closing session speech at the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Arundhati Roy avowed that “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” (“World Social Forum: Arundhati Roy”). Considering that these final lines about another world do not appear in the prepared remarks Roy published in her 2003 book of essays, War Talk, she may have voiced them spontaneously.

2 In her analytical survey of utopia as word and concept, Fátima Vieira considers the myriad story forms of utopian narrative, which include alotopia, euchronia, satirical utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, critical utopia, heterotopia, and hyperutopia. Because of the long and storied history of utopian imaginaries, virtually any future-oriented narrative can be labeled utopian. In my view, this quasi-hegemonic status of the utopian category can end up blurring the specificities of subversive or otherwise future-facing fictions.

3 In his critical survey of speculative fiction, for instance, Marek Oziewicz investigates the intersection of speculative and utopian narratives. Noting the difficulty of differentiating the genres, he observes, “The definition of ‘speculative fiction’ to denote narratives that seek to map out a possible future has also been applied to late 19^th- and early 20^th-century utopias, most of which were concerned with social and political—rather than ­technological—speculation. It is not clear, though, how ‘speculative fiction,’ when used so, is a better term than ‘utopia’” (“Speculative Fiction,” par. 10). Oziewicz comments on the rich tradition of speculative writing by authors of color and its continued appeal as an inclusive, open-ended category. Nevertheless, he frequently reverts to the utopian category whenever challenges arise in distinguishing future-facing narratives. Oziewicz reasons that “‘speculative fiction’ fails to offer any significant critical edge” for classification (“Speculative Fiction,” par. 10). Citing similar conclusions made by Kate Macdonald in the three-volume collection Political Future Fictions (2013), he argues that “[F]uture fictions are best described as utopias rather than speculative fictions” (“Speculative Fiction,” par. 10). In my view, Oziewicz’s remarks demonstrate how even when investigating a distinct (if affiliated) genre like speculative fiction, the sway of utopian categories remains powerful.

4 Regrettably, many revolutionaries of past generations—Marx and Engels among them—employ gender-exclusive language that marginalizes the role of women and nonbinary people in dissident movements. This gender bias began changing in the twentieth century, and inclusive language has now become routine.

5 Some of the authors employing this rhetorical method include Robert F. Williams, George Padmore, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, C. L. R. James, Julius Nyerere, Angela Davis, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Rachel Carson, Paulo Freire, Eduardo Galeano, Amilcar Cabral, bell hooks, Malcolm X, Larry Neal, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Vandana Shiva, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Wangari Maathai, Bill Ayers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Arundhati Roy, and Nnimmo Bassey.

6 Not all texts in these discursive traditions (African decolonization, Black liberation, revolutionary socialism, ecocriticism) conclude with inspiring visions of future liberation. Instead, some authors choose to point up the many challenges that need redress. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Obafemi Awolowo’s Path to Nigerian Freedom; and The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, are some examples. Furthermore, whereas the concluding rhetoric of early ecocriticism (e.g., Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) contain notes of prophetic optimism, the tone of recent ecocriticism (especially twenty-first-century works) tends to be more alarmist, even apocalyptic.

7 Like Fanon’s expansion of revolutionary dialectics, Césaire stretched Marxist paradigms to include the experienced of colonized nations. In a 1967 interview with René Depestre, Césaire states, “I remember very well having said to the Martinican Communists in those days, that black people, as you have pointed out, were doubly proletarianized and alienated: in the first place as workers, but also as blacks, because after all we are dealing with the only race which is denied even the notion of humanity” (“Interview with Aimé Césaire” 94). See also Black feminist and African womanist expansions of masculinist liberation paradigms, especially Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/man Palava; Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy” in The Black Woman; and Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael C. Montesano

Michael C. Montesano (PhD, Indiana University) is Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at Princeton University’s Program in African Studies. His work investigates the frictions between subversive expression and political injustice in literatures of Africa and the Americas. His published scholarship appears in Research in African Literatures, New Directions and Pedagogical Directions for Black Women Writers, Journal of Black Studies, and African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review. Montesano’s academic book manuscript, Capitalist Modernity, Dissident Metaphors, is under contract at Routledge Press.