Helen Kapstein
Helen Kapstein is a tenured postcolonial scholar in the English Department at John Jay College, CUNY. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her areas of interest include South African literature and culture, cultural and media studies, and tourism and museum studies. Her current projects include A New Kind of Safari, on islands, tourism, and nation-building, a series of articles on hysteria as a mode of transitional resistance, and a project on Nigerian short stories as saboteurs of the petroleum industry’s agenda. Her work has appeared in English Studies in Canada, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and Studies in the Humanities, among other venues.
Collected Work
“Crude Fictions: How New Nigerian Short Stories Sabotage Big Oil’s Master Narrative”
New Nigerian short stories, more easily available to readers than ever before, call into question the dominant discourse around oil production nationally and internationally as they depict the complex, lived reality of a resource-rich country riven by corruption, greed, and poverty. The struggle over oil resources and rights regularly involves acts of sabotage and because of their content, their form, and their distribution, the stories themselves can be considered as small acts of sabotage. The stories’ formal qualities - or lack thereof - reflect the circumstances of their production as a tertiary by-product of sabotage. Like the material by-product, the crude oil to be distributed as part of an informal economy, these stories are unrefined. This textual output, like that commodity form, is more quickly available, less constrained by production, less costly for being raw or unprocessed, and more willfully destructive of disciplinary institutions, corporate, national, and literary.
Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics
With Petroforms, Helen Kapstein undertakes close readings of a range of Nigerian aesthetic forms: short stories, romance novels, documentary film, the “Nollywood” film industry, fine art sculpture, and poetry. She uses these forms to argue that the demands of paying attention to petroleum extraction, production, consumption, and distribution in the creation of resource fictions must necessarily alter and affect conventional forms and structures. What results is a new set of genre-bending forms, like documentary film that we can read as horror, in response to the forceful and fluid demands of the petroleum industry and its master narrative.