Englisches Seminar

Dr. Anthony Obute

Postdoctoral Researcher

Contact


anthony.obutespam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de

Phone: (+49) (0)7071-29-74566

Office Hours: per e-mail appointment

Room: 507, Wilhelmstr. 50, 72074 Tübingen

Anthony Chukwudumebi Obute joined the American Studies department in 2018, and earned his PhD in English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen. His dissertation pieced together the transatlantic nexus between the Niger and the Mississippi Delta regions of Nigeria and America respectively through slavery, colonialism, and modern extractive capitalism. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Centre for Global Cooperation Research in 2022, a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Rostock in the Summer Semester of 2023, and a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Fall Semester of 2023. He currently doubles as a postdoctoral fellow in the European Research Council’s AFREXTRACT project at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. 

He is a member of German Association for American Studies (DGfA), African Literature Association (ALA), and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).

Academic Career

2023
Guest Lecturer

University of Maryland, USA

2023
Guest Lecturer

University of Rostock

since 2023
Postdoctoral Researcher

American Studies, University of Tübingen

2022
PhD in English Literatures and Cultures

University of Tübingen

2018
M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures

University of Tübingen

2011
B.A. in English

University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Research Expertise and Interests

  • African American Literatures and Cultures
  • Environmental Humanities
  • Petrol-culture and Resource Extraction
  • Postcolonialism
  • Black Diaspora and Afro-pop culture

Teaching

Winter Semester 2025/2026

Winter Semester 2024/2025

Complete Course List

Publications

  • Published:
    • "Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism”. Cinemas of the Global South, edited by Dilip Menon and Amir Taha. Routledge, 2024.
    • “Unmasking a Cryptic South: The Spatial Emergence of the ‘Abhuman’”. Unmapping the Global South, edited by Fernando Resende, Gero Bauer, and Nicole Hirschfelder, Routledge 2024.
    • Co-edited with Amaral, Diego. Mediascapes of Ruined Geographies in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
    • “Lagos in Motion: Trailing the Environmental Ruins of Urbanization” Mediascapes of Ruined Geographies in the Global South, edited by Diego Amaral and A. Chukwudumebi Obute. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 111-129. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-31590-9#about-this-book
    • “Crude Oil, Crude Practices, and Crooked Corporations: Petrocapitalism in the Niger Delta.” KHK/GCR21, 12 July 2023, www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/gcr-quarterlymagazine/qm-1/2023-articles/qm-1-2023-obute-crude-oil-crude-practices-andcrooked-corporations-petrocapitalism-in-the-niger-delta?type=%27. Accessed 11 July 2023.
    • “Beyond a Trifling Presence: Afro-Germans and Identity Boundaries in Germany.” Who Can Speak and Who is Heard/Hurt? Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany, edited by Mahmoud Arghavan, Nicole Hirschfelder, Luvena Kopp, and Katharina Moytl, Transcript, 2019, pp. 83-100.
    • “Paradigmatic Shift from Archetypal Conservatism to Decadent Modernity in African Literature: A Study of Gabriel Egbe’s Emani”. Veritas Journal of English and Literary Studies, 1(1), 2014, pp. 207-219.
  • Forthcoming:
    • The Atlantic River Roads: Slavery, Colonialism and Extractive Capitalism on the Mississippi and the Niger Deltas (under review)
    • with I. Peša, J. Jack, T. Ndaba, and J. Shaba. Extraction and Environmental Lifeworlds in Africa: Histories of Mining, Oil, and Environmental Change, (under contract with Ohio University Press)
    • Reparative Kinship: Alternative Pathway to Global Cooperation
    • “The Transition Fatigue: Going Green in the Global South”
    • “A Constellation of Rage: ‘Ecoterrorism’, Petrocapitalism, and the Postcolonial State”

Conference Presentations & Talks

  • “Eco-hustlers and Territorial Enclosures: Poetics of the Green Transformation”, Conquest and Compost: Taking Root & Making Kin Symposium, University of Rostock, Rostock, 12 July 2025.
  • “Mangled Migrant Miner: Extractive Ecologies of Transition in Southern African Literatures”, African Literature Association (ALA) 50th Conference, University of Nairobi, Kenya, 26 June 2025.
  • “A Vicious Modernity:  Extractivism in South African Poetry”, Extractivism from the Global South: Comparative Perspectives in Film and Literature Workshop, University of Oxford, 19 June 2025.

Complete List of Talks

Projects

  • Obute, Anthony. The Alchemy of Class and Race in the 19th Century (working title)
    • This project explores the transatlantic alliance between the British working class and enslaved Africans in America in the nineteenth century through literary and cultural productions. While affirming the nuanced subjugation of the group through the dynamics of class and race as well as the imperative of cotton in the brazen exploitation, it seeks to foreground the 'diplomacy of the subalterns' in the abolition of slavery and the legalisation of trade unions to hold manufacturers accountable.