Anthony Obute, Ph.D., joins us as the Honors College scholar-in-residence in Fall 2023. He teaches a section of the Honors Humanities sophomore seminar, HHUM205: Environmental Practices in the Global South, as well as a course in the English department, ENGL368C: Special Topics in African American, African, and African Diaspora Literatures; Black Internationalism in Contemporary Literature. In addition to teaching, Dr. Obute hosts events for Honors College students around various themes related to his research interests.
About Anthony Obute, Ph.D.
Anthony Chukwudumebi Obute is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. He currently researches “Eco-Terrorism” as an ostentatious hegemonic narrative for the global de-legitimation of grassroots environmental movements. He completed his doctoral program at the University of Tübingen where he explored the nexus between the Niger and the Mississippi delta regions of Nigeria and America respectively from enslavement to the environmental ruins of petrocapitalism. His dissertation negates the proposition advanced in some quarters that crude oil was a replacement for the labor of enslaved persons and a complement to abolitionism. Consequently, he foregrounds how petrocapitalism across these places builds upon the ill gains of enslavement, and amplifies the sustained importation of Niger Delta crude oil into the Cancer Alley of Louisiana comparable to the defunct importation of enslaved Africans from the region of Nigeria into the plantations of the Mississippi delta. Since 2018, he has taught at the American Studies Program at the University of Tübingen, and he is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Mediascapes of Ruined Geographies in the Global South. His research interest includes Environmental Humanities, African American Literatures, Postcolonialism, Transnational Black Identities, Cultures of Extractive Capitalism and Resistance Literatures, as well as the Global South.
