Palm oil

New VR-funded project: World-Literature and the Other Oil: Palm Oil Fiction from England and West Africa, 1807-2020

Professor Johan Höglund and Dr Rebecca Duncan have received funding from Vetenskapsådet to conduct a three-year research project titled World-Literature and the Other Oil: Palm Oil Fiction from England and West Africa, 1807-2020.

Though largely overlooked in literary criticism, palm oil has been central to the world-economy since the nineteenth century, when it was first cultivated as a monocrop in West Africa under British imperial control. Today palm oil can be found in everything – from fast-food noodles to gasoline – and is a significant driver of planetary-scale, social and ecological breakdown. The first major literary study of its kind, this project explores how palm oil has shaped fiction-writing, both around the West African plantation frontier, and in a nineteenth-century Britain flooded by new palm-oil commodities. By bringing these sites of palm oil production and consumption together, the project identifies new formal and thematic connections between British and West African fiction. At the same time, the project also examines literature as a key cultural resource for making visible the destructive systems of ecological extraction that continue to inform consumer desires and social identities, into the present. The project will begin in late 2025 and conclude in 2028 and it is supported by an advisory board that includes Jason W. Moore (SUNY Binghampton), Sharae Deckard (University College Dublin), Desiree Lewis (University of the Western Cape),  and Max Haiven (Lakehead University).