Paper short abstract:

By examining literary production about resource extraction from Johannesburg and the Niger Delta, I foreground lived experiences of environmental transformation, waste, and pollution. The paper theorises notions of temporality, highlighting slow violence and exhausted futurity.

Paper long abstract:

Literary production about oil drilling in the Niger Delta and gold mining in Johannesburg has been copious. This paper analyses how subterranean resources come to the surface, causing environmental transformations and overhauling lived experiences. I examine “Fancies Idle” by Peter Abrahams (1938), Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018), and Uhuru Phalafala’s Mine, Mine, Mine (2023), alongside Obari Gomba’s Pearls of the Mangrove (1999), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), and Chimeka Garrick’s A Broken People’s Playlist (2020). Combining literary analysis with socio-environmental history, I will highlight two issues. First, I seek to understand how notions of waste and pollution have been experienced, relating this to questions of value in the context of mining and oil drilling. By zooming in on mining waste dumps and agricultural fields devastated by oil spills, I ask what was valued and by whom. How could the promise of extractive wealth coexist with ecosystem ruination? How has literature depicted the creation of sacrifice zones and wasting relationships? Secondly, I theorise notions of temporality, connecting the past, to the present, and future. How do notions of slow violence come together with exhausted futurities? How does literary production mediate resource extraction’s future promises of wealth and historical processes of pollution and environmental degradation? As resource extraction is one of the defining features of the Anthropocene, it is important to map historical and literary representations of mining and oil drilling in order to understand the material and imaginative transformations it has set in motion.