Neoliberal extraction and aquatic resistance in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

ABSTRACT

Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) addresses the literal and metaphorical invisibility of oil in mainstream discourse, and depicts the ways it influences social order, material infrastructure, and territorial sovereignty. Existing scholarship on the novel focuses on the end-effect of petro-development (ecological destruction) but does not comprehensively address the neo-liberal logic that perpetuates such destruction through its limited modes of seeing and understanding water. The present article studies the novel’s depiction of the way the petro-infrastructure exploits the Niger Delta for resource extraction and causes the disintegration of bodies of water into inert spaces. It goes on to analyse the novel’s structure to emphasize how elemental disintegration is countered through depiction of the agential qualities of water such as biodiversity, morphology, and immersion. In this way, Oil on Water highlights the role of water as a life-source and posits it as a space resistant to the logic of ecological domination.

KEYWORDS:

• Oil
• water
• Helon Habila
• Nigeria
• petro-culture
• ecocriticism
• neo-liberalism

Acknowledgments

I want to extend my gratitude to the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich for granting me a fellowship to develop this work. I also want to thank the Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

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Saba Pirzadeh

Saba Pirzadeh is assistant professor of English and environmental literature at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. Her research examines violence, natural degradation, socio-ecological justice, and ethics of representation in literary texts. In 2019, she was a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Her work has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment(ISLE), South Asian Review, Parergon, South Asian Popular Culture, Interventions, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication.