GSSC Seminar Series
29 July 2025
Crude realities: Infrastructural violence, epistemic injustice and extractive necropolitics in Nigeria
Goutam Karmakar ( University of Hyderabad, India)
12:00-13:00
In this era of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, infrastructure serves as a primary conduit for state machinery, functioning as a locus where politics, policy, planning, and implementation intersect with neocolonial and developmental initiatives. Taking these dimensions of infrastructure into critical African geographies, the talk focuses exclusively on the extraction of oil in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, different modes of production and distribution, as well as the resultant environmental toxicity due to the extractive industries in the region. The talk further sheds light on how communities living in this region are subjected to double infrastructural violence that results in environmental and epistemic injustice, showcasing the crude realities of (non)governmentality and the politically entangled dynamics of capital accumulation. Concurrently, the talk highlights how the extractive practices in this region are very much necropolitical in nature, perceiving human lives as waste and disposable ones and consistently posing existential threats, thereby necessitating the importance of decolonial repair.
Goutam Karmakar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, India. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany, and an honorary research associate at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Previously he was a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Karmakar’s research interests include Global South literary studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, environmental studies and cultural studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals including ISLE, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Scrutiny2, Current Writing, English Academy Review, Journal of Human Values, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Socio-Ecological Practice Research, South Asian Review, and South Asia Research, among others. Besides these, Karmakar is also a series editor for the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.