African Tropics and Ecological Crisis: Tourist Gaze in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Travellers

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.1.2026.4279

Keywords:

African tropics, tourist gaze, slow violence, environmental tourism, ecological justice, African postcolonial ecocriticism, Helon Habila

Abstract

The paper examines how Helon Habila’s novels, Oil on Water (2010) and Travellers (2019), critique the tourist gaze as a means of commercializing ecological degradation and human dislocation in the vulnerable African tropics. Drawing on an African and Western postcolonial ecocritical framework, it demonstrates how Habila’s narratives foreground the convergence of tourism, extractive capitalism, slow ecological violence, and neocolonial power dynamics. Applying John Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze, Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this paper argues that Habila’s work shifts tourism studies and ecocriticism towards ecological justice and decolonial ethics. The paper highlights African environmental activism and intellectual traditions, particularly legacies inherited from Ken Saro-Wiwa and Wangari Maathai, by situating Habila’s novels within a much longer history concerning resistance against environmental degradation in Africa. This paper attends to both theoretical dimensions as well as textual particulars within Habila’s novels while contributing toward a postcolonial ecocriticism that resists Western domination over environmental knowledge by insisting on African epistemologies as central to any broader understanding of environmental crisis.

Author Biographies

Mahaprasad Rath, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, India

Mahaprasad Rath is a passionate researcher in English Literature at the School of Liberal Studies, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar. His academic pursuits explore the intersections of ecology, culture, identity and power, with a strong focus on postcolonial and ecological narratives. His work critically examines how literature reflects and responds to environmental crises, identity formation, culture and the politics of place. By engaging with themes such as environmental justice, cultural memory, and gender, Rath aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between human societies and their ecological surroundings.

Swati Samantaray, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, India

Swati Samantaray serves as Professor in the Department of Humanities, School of Liberal Studies, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, where she plays an instrumental role in fostering both the academic and personal development of students. Her research interests traverse a wide intellectual terrain, spanning ecocriticism, cultural studies, blue humanities, digital humanities, mysticism and film studies. Her scholarly profile is distinguished by an extensive body of research, encompassing authored and edited volumes such as The Mystic Flights of Tagore, Mysticism: A Literary Quest for Ultimate Reality, Folklore: A Key to Cultural Understanding, and Jagannath in the South Asian Literary and Folkloric Tradition. Complementing these contributions is a significant corpus of journal articles and conference presentations, attesting to her sustained engagement with academic inquiry.

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Published

2026-03-04

How to Cite

Rath, M., & Samantaray, S. . (2026). African Tropics and Ecological Crisis: Tourist Gaze in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Travellers. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 25(1), 98–115. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.1.2026.4279

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 1 (2026): Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques: Literary Travels

Section

Travel Novels and Film Narrative

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