Beyond a Capitalist Atlantic: Fish, Fuel, and the Collapse of Cheap Nature in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Nigeria

Abstract

This article takes a world-ecological approach to regional depictions of Atlantic coastal communities, analysing a widescale cultural engagement with regimes of fish and oil extraction. In Part I, I focus on Irish filmmaker Risteard O'Domhnaill's 2010 documentary,The Pipe, which depicts the battle of a coastal Irish community against a gas pipeline project, and his next major production, Atlantic (2016), a comparative documentary of fishing and fossil-fuel industries in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Norway. While The Pipe opens up the debate around energy, environmental futurity, and state violence, a world-ecological lens reveals how Atlantic normalizes a nationalist, capitalist attitude to oil extraction that contradicts both films' professed desires for sustainable fisheries and stable ecologies. In Part II, I turn to a cluster of three novels which also depict the interconnections between fishing and oil industries in different geographic settings along the Atlantic: Solar Bones (2016) by Irish author Mike McCormack, February (2010) by Canadian author Lisa Moore, and Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. I outline how the oceanic aesthetics and narratives of these texts reveal and denaturalize the masculinist and capitalist epistemologies that drive ecological regimes of fish and oil extractivism over the longuedurée. The article ultimately argues that a multidisciplinary and multiform approach enables a wider comprehension of the cultural and ecological challenges facing the Atlantic today.

Offshore Mysteries, Narrative Infrastructure: Oil, Noir, and the World-Ocean

“…Both fields have begun to address the importance of the offshore in social and cultural life. 1 It provides a useful 1 For example, see Campbell (2019); Jones and Motha (2015); Macdonald (2015); Paye (2019); Polack and Farquharson (2017); Sheller (2018). optic, the multiple meanings of which-flagging, offshore oil-rigs, offshore finance-suggest a way of interpreting the links between oil, the ocean, and literary genre.…”