Englisches Seminar

Dr. Anthony Obute

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).

Research Expertise and Interests

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

Education

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

Teaching

Within Tübingen

Winter Semester 2024/2025

Winter Semester 2021/2022

Summer Semester 2021

Winter Semester 2020/2021

Outside of Tübingen

Fall Semester 2023: 

  • Environmental Practices in the Global South (University of Maryland)
  • Film Art in Global Society (University of Maryland, USA)

Summer Semester 2023: 

  • Environmental Activism in the Global South (Uni Rostock)

Publications

Recent Publications

  • “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

  • 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)
  • “A Constellation of Rage: ‘Ecoterrorism’, Petrocapitalism, and the Postcolonial State”
  • The Transition Fatigue: Going Green in the Global South