Dr. Philip Aghoghovwia
MA (Ibadan), PhD (Stellenbosch)
My teaching, research and ethical commitments are in environmental humanities, postcolonial literatures, and energy and water studies. My work explores literary depictions of place and community life in the context of resource extraction, especially concerning oil and water. My interest in place and resource extraction is borne out of my own experience of place, an environment blighted by “the resource curse”. Born in the Niger Delta, the quintessential theatre of oil extraction in Africa, I grew up observing the paradox inherent in this bioregion. The Niger Delta is a landscape with prodigious oil reserves and overwhelming social and ecological deprivations, a situation that elicits a rich body of environmental writing and at the same time fashions a culture of militancy whose politics of resistance exacerbates the issues it purports to address. Global insatiable hunger for natural resources and desperate forms of community resistance combine to decimate the local environment and community life. The passion to apprehend these incongruities has fired my interests and education in postcolonial studies and African literature, giving me the lens, personal experience and the appropriate vocabulary needed for engaging them.
My objectives as a university teacher are to have students understand the fundamental content of text – its critical readings, approaches, and themes, and the contexts in which these apply. I encourage student to develop critical and problem solving skills that they can apply to textual reading and to the course in general, acuity that must reflect their own positioning as agential learners. In this way, students are able to make critical interventions that are informed not by the logics of collective speak and virtue signalling but by nuance understanding and appreciation of the issues and concepts under discussion.
Courses taught
Areas of Interest
My research is in environmental humanities, African literatures, energy and water studies, and the cultures and politics of resource extraction in the postcolonial world. My most recent works have appeared in Routledge (2023), Interventions (2022), Cambridge University Press (2022), and my recent monograph titled Violent Ecotropes: Petroculture in the Niger Delta https://doi.org/10.1515/9780796926463, published by HSRC Press, Cape Town (2022).
Scholarly Work
- [Book] Violent Ecotropes: Petroculture in the Niger Delta. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2022, 132 pp.
- Book chapter. “Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital? Water Priva(tisa)tion and Ontology Reimagined in Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water.” In Reading for Water: Materiality and Method, edited by Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall. Routledge, 2023. Forthcoming
- Book chapter (co-authored with Emily McGiffin). “African Ecopoetics.” Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, edited by Mary Newell, Julia Fiedorczuk and Orchid Tienney. Routledge, 2023. Forthcoming
- Book chapter. “Postcolonial Nature.” In Nature and Literary Studies, edited by Peter Remien and Scott Slovic. Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 211 - 228.
- Journal article. “Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital? Water Priva(tisa)tion and Ontology Reimagined in Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water.” Interventions, 24:3 (2022): 434-450.
- Book review. “Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony by Louise Green.” Social Dynamics, 48:1 (2022): 184-187
- Book chapter. “Harry Garuba: an unclassifiable intellectual, mentor, and friend.” In Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love: A Gadenkschrift for Harry Garuba, edited by Remi Raji et al. Kraft Books, 2022, pp. 81 – 85.
- Journal article. “Making a Living as a Scholar.” A Roundtable on the University of Cape Town Fire of April 2021. Safundi 22.3 (2021): 221-222.
- Journal article (co-authored with Marivate, V., et al.) “The Fourth Industrial Revolution – what does it mean to our future faculty?” South African Journal of Science, 117:5/6 (2021): 1-3.
- Book chapter. “Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta.” Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Lynn Badia and Marija Cetinić. Routledge, 2021, pp. 33-46.
- Journal article. “Interiority as Narrative Agency in Teju Cole’s Open City.” English Academy Review 37:2 (2020): 20-33.
- Journal article. “The Karoo and Eco-Inflection of Fracking: Preliminary Notes on Literary Imagination.” Safundi 18:1 (2017): 52-68.
- Book chapter. “Nigeria”. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger. Fordham University Press, 2017, pp. 238-241.
- Journal article. “Poetics of Cartography: Globalism and the ‘Oil Enclave’: Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta.” Social Dynamics 43:1 (2017): 32-45.
- Book chapter. “Strategic Apocalypse and the Turn towards ‘Yasunization’: Nnimmo Bassey’s Poetry.” Handmaidens of Death: Apocalypse and Revelation, edited by Alexander Simon-Lopez & Mankhrawbor Dunai. Brill, 2016, pp. 85-95).
- Journal article. “The Poetics and Politics of Transnational Petro-Environmentalism: Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought it was Oil but it was Blood.” English in Africa, 41:2 (2014): 59-77.