Results by title

2026 PROSE Award Finalist, Humanities: Literature

Petroforms contributes a much-needed theory of form and genre to the cutting-edge field of petrocriticism, itself an offshoot of developments in postcolonial ecocriticism. Studies of resource fiction and inquiries in the energy humanities have recently taken their rightful place as necessary reflections on the role of the literary imagination in intervening in the Anthropocene as we find ourselves precariously placed in the face of a fossil fuel crisis, climate change, and mass extinctions.

With Petroforms, Helen Kapstein undertakes close readings of a range of Nigerian aesthetic forms: short stories, romance novels, documentary film, the “Nollywood” film industry, fine art sculpture, and poetry. She uses these forms to argue that the demands of paying attention to petroleum extraction, production, consumption, and distribution in the creation of resource fictions must necessarily alter and affect conventional forms and structures. What results is a new set of genre-bending forms, like documentary film that we can read as horror, in response to the forceful and fluid demands of the petroleum industry and its master narrative.
Nigeria is one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, in which that production is concentrated in the Niger Delta, resulting in a local environment that has been steadily degraded by oil spills, flares, pollution, and contamination, and a local culture shaped by false scarcity in a space of abundance, murderous politics, and escalating violence. At the same time as the Niger Delta grounds Kapstein’s argument in its own political realities and cultural responses, Nigeria’s participation in a global economy of petrodependency allows her theory of petroforms to be extended and applied more generally.

What Peter Hitchcock calls “oil’s generative law” is that it is “everywhere and obvious, it must be opaque or otherwise fantastic.” He means the coexistence of oil’s taken-for-granted qualities is something constitutive of every level of everyday life and its spectacular displays—gushers, spills, explosions. Oil’s nature, the fact that it is everywhere, unctuously oozing into every corner of everyday life, means that it constantly spills over out of our existing forms, genres, and systems, demanding accommodation. To try to contain it, we create new forms. Thus, a petroform is simultaneously reactionary (a necessary response to oil’s pressures, a by-product of the commodity itself) and resistant (an attempt at containment, at generating a retort to the very thing that shapes it). Each form figures oil and then configures and reconfigures itself in reaction to it.

On American energy and its persisting power to destroy.

In the United States, the promise of a green-energy future is complicated by its realities. The country’s legacy energy systems are decrepit; the rollout of new technologies is unequal and piecemeal; households find themselves increasingly without reliable or affordable access; and Americans are excluded from the decisions that shape their energy futures. Having power in America has become an exercise in race, class, and wealth—in more ways than one.

Power Lines is a sweeping portrait of American energy in the twenty-first century, rendered in terms of its increasing—and inevitable—human costs. Coal miners in West Virginia lose their livelihoods as energy markets change; historically marginalized households cannot easily access new technologies; children in “sacrifice zones” adjacent to mineral-mining sites suffer health problems and limited resources; and cities and towns are burdened from the production of alternative energies.

Sanya Carley and David Konisky show current challenges and an uncertain future of America’s greatest policy imperative. The result is not only sobering but also essential for planning and pursuing a clean-energy transition that improves on the errors of the past.

The inspiring story of a grassroots rebellion

Powerline describes the opposition of rural Minnesotans to the building of a high voltage powerline across 430 miles of farmland from central North Dakota to the Twin Cities suburbs. Convinced that the safety of their families and the health of their land was disregarded in favor of the gluttonous energy consumption of cities, the farmer-led revolt began as questioning and escalated to rampant civil disobedience, peaking in 1978 when nearly half of Minnesota’s state highway patrol was engaged in stopping sabotage of the project.