Wetland Futures: Postcolonial Ruderal Ecologies in the Climate Crisis

Abstract

This paper brings together two lines of analysis: the deployment of nature as infrastructure in colonial development projects, and the place of wetlands in historical as well as ongoing accounts of exploration and extractivism. Rather than a commodity-oriented analysis which focuses on the culture-making properties of a single commodity, this paper opts for a scale where it is possible to see how one commodity frontier folds into another within the same ecosystem. The analysis begins with the politics of colonial research speculation as a stage of capture that is legally ‘speculative’ but causes ecological harm and economic consequences that extend far into the futures of these wetlands. A discard studies approach is particularly generative in this context because it offers anti-colonial analytics for the status of something being held in reserve so that colonial futures can be estimated and safeguarded. Learning from the scholarship on the relationship between colonialism and waste, the paper demonstrates a possible reading method for Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water. This is an attempt at resisting habits of reading that follow the trajectories of colonial futurism and instead focusing on what the text might be able to say about wetland futures.