Description: Oil's nature, the fact that it is everywhere, unctuously oozing into every corner of everyday life, means that it constantly spills over out of our existing forms, genres, and systems, demanding accommodation. To try to contain it, we create new forms--petroforms.
Review Quotes:
2026PROSE Award Finalist, Humanities: Literature
"...Kapstein asks us to consider the possibility that 'different forms get at different aspects of living with and around petroleum' in contemporary Nigeria. Her illuminating analyses of this thoughtfully curated collection of texts makes that argument in a compelling way." --Délice Williams, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2026
"Petroforms is a remarkable study of the manifold genres produced not merely by what we in the energy humanities term petromodernity; it attends to those 'crude' genres that arise organically from the extraction, refinement and distribution of petroleum within global markets. The central argument--that oil engenders its own forms, because it exceeds the ontological containers available through conventional literary-critical protocols--is one that has often been made in the context of reader reception but not necessarily in terms of artistic production." --Stacey Balkan, associate professor of environmental humanities at Florida Atlantic University and author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancyin India and co-author of Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice and Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere.
"Responding to the sense that oil encounters are difficult to capture in literature, Petroforms demonstrates how literary, filmic, sculptural, and pop-cultural forms from Nigeria stretch and change to represent oil. Helen Kapstein locates this formal stretching not only in documentaries and short stories that portray devastation in the Niger Delta but also in the other face of Nigerian oil: the romance--even the eroticism--of petromodernity for more privileged subjects in Lagos and beyond. Recognizing that petromodernity is classed and regionalized but also gendered, Kapstein foregrounds the ambivalent participation of Nigerian women as both protestors of oil extractivism and beneficiaries of petromodernity. Taking readers from short story to romance novel, sculpture, drama, and even sitcom, Petroforms illustrates the wide-ranging formal innovation prompted by Nigeria's ongoing enmeshment with oil."--B. Jamieson Stanley is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware "[A]n urgent intervention into the cultural politics of energy, showing how Nigerian artists make visible and reckon with the costs, consequences, and contradictionsof life in oil zones."
--Imre Szeman, coeditor of Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy