Fragilized Ecologies and Multilayer Violence in Two Oil Films About the Niger Delta

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region has continuously been conceived as a context of terror and political violence. However, this representation of the Niger Delta is deemed too schematic and misleading since it does not account for oil production's complicated local and human issues. In fact, violent mining geographies like the Niger Delta are always permeated by various forms of subtle and imperceptible violence that, if overlooked, may lead to misrepresentations. Rob Nixon has theorized such invisibilized forms of violence as "slow violence." Building on this concept of slow violence as long emergencies that are hard to harness and turn into dramatic stories, this article examines how Black November : Struggle for the Niger Delta (Jeta Amata, 2012) and Oloibiri (Curtis Graham and Samantha Iwowo, 2016), two films set in the vulnerable ecosystem of the Niger Delta oil-producing enclaves, take on the representational challenge posed by the slow violence of ecological destruction. It studies how the filmmakers conceptualize slow violence and explores their strategies to make visible subtle forms of harm that resist representation. More specifically, it analyzes how spatiotemporal relations, images, and narrative sequences are combined to witness the slow violence of oil production and ecological destruction.