Fashioning Petrotopia: Environmental Crime in Oil Extractive Zones

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of “petrotopia” in global oil extractive zones through Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit, Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water. Drawing on energy humanities and Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, it argues that petrofiction exposes oil territories as sacrifice zones shaped by environmental crime, racial injustice, and forced displacement. While the novels depict spectacular forms of petro-violence—murders, military repression, and militant resistance—they also foreground less visible ecological devastation such as poisoned water systems, habitat destruction, climate alteration, and psychological trauma. Across Oklahoma, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Niger Delta, oil capitalism transforms peripheral communities into disposable landscapes in the service of imperial and corporate power. The promise of oil wealth produces an illusion of prosperity, yet results in displacement, “displacement without moving,” and environmental desolation. By expanding the meaning of crime beyond individual acts to systemic ecological destruction, the paper contends that petrotopia represents not utopia but a dystopian order structured by extraction and sacrifice. Petrofiction thus makes visible the hidden violences of fossil-fuel modernity.