Subversive text as dystopian negative: speculative gesture, prophetic rhetoric, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

Abstract

This paper connects a crucial use of rhetoric in activist texts of the past 175 years to a similar rhetorical structure in the arts. In causes such as African decolonization, Black liberation, revolutionary socialism, and ecocriticism, activist texts vehemently expose injustice and turn swiftly at the end toward emancipatory possibility. Using Fred Moten’s concept of prophesy, I read this rhetorical structure as a vital intervention in the imaginary of the future possible, and I use the term “dystopian negative” to describe artistic uses of this rhetoric. In my reading of Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, I examine how the dystopian negative rejects the alarmism of dystopian narratives, gesturing instead to possible alternatives. Interpreting this gesture as a call to audiences to participate actively in building better futures, this article queries the role of the audience in the interpretive field of dissident expression.