Long Abstract:

In Violent Eco-tropes: Reading petroculture in the Niger Delta, Philip Aghoghovwia offers a new interpretation of petro- violence beyond its materially-based response to crude extraction. Analysing a number of contemporary texts across genres – poetry, film, short video performances, and photographs – Aghoghovwia reads violence as also metonymic devices employed in representations of the oil ontology, the lived reality in the Niger River Delta. He argues that the narratives of oil in the Niger Delta constitute a “hermeneutics of locality,” one that vivifies the climate crisis to be a profound actuality of place. With this formulation he challenges the manner in which the global discourse of the climate crisis insists upon the understanding of the accelerated changes to the Earth’s climate by the disproportionate focus of the sites that appear to index the global: the melting glaciers, decimated coral reefs, mountain wildfires, sea-level rises, and societal detritus in the ocean. While these are undoubtedly legitimate research sites to think about with our planet in peril, he challenges their tendency to evoke a sense of abstraction, far-removed, vague, and generalized. Aghoghovwia argues that one of the consequences of this misapprehension is the weakening of the sense of urgency needed to grasp (and address) the enormity of the environmental crisis in places where anthropogenic recklessness is most palpable, the defunct landscapes of oil extraction, which bear the imprint of modernity’s march towards progress, such as the Niger Delta.