By Helen Kapstein. West Virginia UP, 2025

Petroforms are the new aesthetic objects that emerge from art’s encounter with petroleum, read here specifically through the Nigerian experience of oil extraction, production, and attendant devastations. By grounding its argument in site-specific examples, Petroforms is able to make historically and culturally precise claims while at the same time advancing petrocriticism as a field. Its author, Helen Kapstein, brings her background in postcolonial literary and cultural studies to bear on a range of texts, from film to sculpture to drama, training a keen eye on them to produce close readings and draw provocative connections. Each section of the book contributes to the overall assertion that oil transforms and deforms our received and familiar forms. Petroforms brings the energy humanities up to date by centering the Global South as the site of production of both the resource itself and the art forms that engage with it.

Helen Kapstein is a Professor in the English Department at John Jay College, The City University of New York. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics (2025) is her second book, part of the Energy & Society series from West Virginia University Press. Her work has appeared in venues ranging from Postcolonial Text and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment to Ms. magazine and The Conversation. She is a Past President of the Cultural Studies Association.