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Resource Fictions: Oil, Water and Conflict in the World-System

Module description

Resource wars over dwindling supplies of oil and water are the next greatest threat to the future of capitalist civilisation. Examining contemporary hydro- and petro-fictions from across the world (e.g. Nigeria, Finland, China, Ireland, America), this module will offer you an opportunity to consider theories of world literature, postcolonial ecocriticism and world-ecology through a comparative analysis of global resource imaginaries. We will engage with different cultural forms (novels, documentary film, poetry) and genres (realism, modernism, science fiction, YA dystopias) to investigate the cultural representation of global resource crises and conflict. Focusing on issues such as the mismanagement of resources, production of scarcity, climate change, marginal communities, privatisation, the Anthropocene, gender and mal-development, we will consider how these texts provide optics into the study of water and oil, not just as resources to be extracted, but as producing a modern sensibility of abundance and scarcity. 

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module invites you to explore relationships between resources, imperialism and culture. It will enable you to reach an informed understanding of the relationship between world literary, postcolonial and ecocritical approaches to literature and aims to introduce you to a wide range of primary materials in a number of different genres spanning the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These writings will be read alongside theorists interested in literature, energy, commodity fictions and capitalist modernity, thus enhancing close reading skills through an analysis of the political and ecological unconscious of cultural forms, and providing you with the theoretical skills that will enable you to engage critically with this rich field. Where appropriate, the module will encourage you to identify connections between writers, genres and other key socio-ecological movements. Your studies will be guided by the module  leaders’ own research in this new and growing area of literary studies.

“Resource Fictions” will enable you to explore the ways in which different forms of imperialism are articulated through conflicts over water and oil, to equip you with the ability to understand these processes, and to alert you to the global consequences they entail. By introducing you to a range of ‘hydro-‘ and ‘petro-’ texts, you will explore the ways in which cultural representations of environmental crisis are deepened and complicated by gender, race and class. These are all important considerations for anyone interested in employment in the cultural, heritage, non-profit and environmental sectors.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of cultural responses to resource crises and ecology in various global contexts from the late-twentieth to early twenty-first century;
• 2. Compare and contrast primary texts, making connections between different texts in the field of ecocriticism
• 3. Enter into scholarly conversation with scholarly work in the field of world literary studies and ecocriticism;

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse a range of literatures and concepts and to relate their concerns and modes of expression to their cultural, political, social and theoretical contexts;
• 5. Ddemonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history;
• 6. Demonstrate an ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to relate these ideas to literary texts;

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Through seminar/session work, demonstrate communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups;
• 8. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, a capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose;
• 9. Through research and writing, demonstrate an advanced capacity to make critical use of secondary material, to question assumptions, and to reflect on your own learning process.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• The module will intersperse analyses of ‘hydro’ and ‘petro’ texts, to enable you to make interrelations between primary works and critical theories emerging from both.
• Beyond Postcolonial Ecocriticism? Comparative Approaches to Resource Fictions
• Producing Scarcity: Vulnerability and Mismanagement
• Climate Change in the World-System
• Resource Conflict and Marginal Communities
• State Violence and the Privatisation of Resources
• Documentary Approaches in Film, Prose and Poetry
• Petrocultures and the Anthropocene
• Gender, Biodiversity and Mal-development

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading/viewing *may* include:

• Nawal el Saadawi Love in the Kingdom of Oil.
• Still life (2008) directed by Jia Zhangke
• Niger Delta fiction selection
• Caribbean writing/music selection (short stories, poetry, calypso) on the theme of drought and deluge, oil booms
• Emmi Itäranta Memory of Water (2013)

Selected Secondary Texts:

• Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden eds. Oil Culture.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
• Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69 (2010): 81-97.
• LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
• Ma, Jun. China’s Water Crisis. Trans. by Nancy Yang Liu and Lawrence R. Sullivan. Norwalk: EastBridge, 2004.
• MacDonald, Graeme. “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 4.2 (2013).
• McDougall, Russell. “Caribbean Water and Hydro-Piracy.” Kunapipi 34. 2 (2012): 191-199.
• Moore, Jason W., and Tom Keefer. 2011. “Wall Street Is a Way of Organizing Nature: An Interview with Jason Moore.” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 12 (May): 39-53.
• Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” Debating World Literature. London: Verso, 2004.
• Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Niblett, Michael. 2012. “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16 (Summer): 15-30.
• Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
• Parenti, Christian. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books, 2011.
• Pearce, Fred. When the River Runs Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the 21st Century. London: Eden Project Books, 2007.
• Shiva, Vandana. Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, Profit. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.
• Slevin, Amanda. Gas, oil and the Irish state: Understanding the dynamics and conflicts of hydrocarbon management. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
• Szeman, Imre et al. After Oil. Virginia: West Virginia Press, 2016.
• Szeman, Imre et al. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017.
• Watts, Michael. “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity.” Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 189–212.
• Wenzel, Jennifer et al. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
• Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9.4(2006): 449-464.
• Wilson Sheena et al. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.
• Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Age of Wood, Tallow, Coal …” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 305-310.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=11202
• Ariel: a review of international English literature
• Capitalism, Nature, Socialism
• Contemporary Literature
• Green Letters
• Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
• ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
• Journal of Commonwealth Literature
• Journal of Postcolonial Writing
• Modern Language Quarterly
• Postcolonial Studies
• Postcolonial Text
• Textual Practice

All of these are available through Exeter’s elibrary

Key words search

Resource fictions, postcolonial, world, contemporary literatures, globalisation, ecology, water, oil, hydrofictions, petrofictions, neo-colonialism, imperialism; African, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, American, European and Chinese writing and film