Christine Okoth
Biographic Data
| ID | 445561 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christine Okoth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christine |
| FAMILY NAME | Okoth |
| SIGNATURE | OKOTH C |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4571-0773 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Migrant remittances and the frontiers of finance
This essay excavates the material foundations of financialization through a reading of two texts in which migrant remittances are centrally positioned as a financial product that reveals financialization’s own indebtedness to the economic structures of colonial export economies. Both Ousmane Sembène’s post-independence, pre-structural adjustment novella Le mandat or The Money-Order (1965) and Nigerian-American author Okey Ndibe’s post-globalizati…
World literature and commodity Frontiers
This introduction to a special issue on world literature and commodity frontiers elaborates on the methodological premise of the issue. The essays collected here all pursue a form of comparativism grounded in the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. Commodity frontiers are spaces of extraction or production that reorganize land and labour in such a way as to send vast reservoirs of food, energy, raw materials, and labour-…
Narrative reproduction: Plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust
This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis ar…
Fred Moten, Black and Blur, (Vol. 1. consent not to be a single being)
Fred Moten, Black and Blur, (Vol. 1. consent not to be a single being) Duke University Press, 2017. Pp.360. ISBN 978-0-8223-7016 Christine Okoth, University of Warwick To many, the scholar and poet Fred Moten is best known as one of the authors of the manifesto The Undercommons (2013), co-written with Stefano Harney who was once Deputy Director of the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London. Moten and Harney’s poetic…
The Missing Matter of Revolution: Hydroelectricity and the Terrain of Postcolonial Politics
Through readings of two novels that feature hydroelectric facilities—Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift—this article demonstrates how each text grapples in very different ways with the tensions between extractive infrastructures and revolutionary politics. Focusing on a hydroelectric facility yet to be constructed, A Wreath for Udomo reaches for the formal capacities of the novel to stage how the process of fo…
In Practice: Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis
I have been thinking a lot about environmental pedagogy in American studies, especially since I started teaching a third-year interdisciplinary course, Climate Change & Culture Wars, which focusses on the post-1970s US. I wanted to know more about how others are approaching the topic as we face up to looming climate and ecological collapse. University teachers and learners across disciplines are reckoning with it, but what's going on in American …
The extractive form of contemporary Black writing: Dionne Brand and Yaa Gyasi
This article suggests that the epistemological and ecological rubric of extraction offers an additional way to conceptualise the formal composition of race in contemporary Black literature. It develops the concept of extractive form through readings of Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016) and Dionne Brand’s longform lyric poem Inventory (2006), two texts in which extractive regimes and their logics are acknowledged, reshaped, and appropriated. Extr…
Fred Moten, Stolen Life, (Vol. 2. of consent not to be a single being)
Fred Moten, Stolen Life, (Vol. 2. of consent not to be a single being) Duke University Press, 2018. Pp.337. ISBN 9780822370581 Christine Okoth, University of Warwick In the context of the neoliberal university and the marketisation of education, the assignment is a means of measuring progress, monitoring productivity, and maintaining the institutional hierarchies that govern educational settings. The assignment also ensures that student and teach…
Materials of African Futures
director of Heinemann Educational Books James Currey recalls a pivotal moment in the expansion of the series.The scene follows a brief description of some significant changes in Heinemann's logistical network:Initially Heinemann books were stocked and distributed by Longman, but in 1972 Aig Higo, just after the end of the civil war, built a substantial Heinemann warehouse at Jericho in Ibadan in time to be able to handle the African Writers Serie…
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6294-4 Christine Okoth Christina Sharpe’s 2016 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being joins other recent publications in the field of Black Studies in combining visual, literary, and theoretical archives to describe the contemporary condition of Black life and death. In doing so, Sharpe moves gracefully between vastly disparate geographical a…
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6294-4 Christine Okoth Christina Sharpe’s 2016 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being joins other recent publications in the field of Black Studies in combining visual, literary, and theoretical archives to describe the contemporary condition of Black life and death. In doing so, Sharpe moves gracefully between vastly disparate geographical a…
Materials of African Futures
director of Heinemann Educational Books James Currey recalls a pivotal moment in the expansion of the series.The scene follows a brief description of some significant changes in Heinemann's logistical network:Initially Heinemann books were stocked and distributed by Longman, but in 1972 Aig Higo, just after the end of the civil war, built a substantial Heinemann warehouse at Jericho in Ibadan in time to be able to handle the African Writers Serie…
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6294-4 Christine Okoth Christina Sharpe’s 2016 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being joins other recent publications in the field of Black Studies in combining visual, literary, and theoretical archives to describe the contemporary condition of Black life and death. In doing so, Sharpe moves gracefully between vastly disparate geographical a…
Fred Moten, Stolen Life, (Vol. 2. of consent not to be a single being)
Fred Moten, Stolen Life, (Vol. 2. of consent not to be a single being) Duke University Press, 2018. Pp.337. ISBN 9780822370581 Christine Okoth, University of Warwick In the context of the neoliberal university and the marketisation of education, the assignment is a means of measuring progress, monitoring productivity, and maintaining the institutional hierarchies that govern educational settings. The assignment also ensures that student and teach…
Materials of African Futures
director of Heinemann Educational Books James Currey recalls a pivotal moment in the expansion of the series.The scene follows a brief description of some significant changes in Heinemann's logistical network:Initially Heinemann books were stocked and distributed by Longman, but in 1972 Aig Higo, just after the end of the civil war, built a substantial Heinemann warehouse at Jericho in Ibadan in time to be able to handle the African Writers Serie…
In Practice: Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis
I have been thinking a lot about environmental pedagogy in American studies, especially since I started teaching a third-year interdisciplinary course, Climate Change & Culture Wars, which focusses on the post-1970s US. I wanted to know more about how others are approaching the topic as we face up to looming climate and ecological collapse. University teachers and learners across disciplines are reckoning with it, but what's going on in American …
The extractive form of contemporary Black writing: Dionne Brand and Yaa Gyasi
This article suggests that the epistemological and ecological rubric of extraction offers an additional way to conceptualise the formal composition of race in contemporary Black literature. It develops the concept of extractive form through readings of Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016) and Dionne Brand’s longform lyric poem Inventory (2006), two texts in which extractive regimes and their logics are acknowledged, reshaped, and appropriated. Extr…
Fred Moten, Black and Blur, (Vol. 1. consent not to be a single being)
Fred Moten, Black and Blur, (Vol. 1. consent not to be a single being) Duke University Press, 2017. Pp.360. ISBN 978-0-8223-7016 Christine Okoth, University of Warwick To many, the scholar and poet Fred Moten is best known as one of the authors of the manifesto The Undercommons (2013), co-written with Stefano Harney who was once Deputy Director of the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London. Moten and Harney’s poetic…
The Missing Matter of Revolution: Hydroelectricity and the Terrain of Postcolonial Politics
Through readings of two novels that feature hydroelectric facilities—Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift—this article demonstrates how each text grapples in very different ways with the tensions between extractive infrastructures and revolutionary politics. Focusing on a hydroelectric facility yet to be constructed, A Wreath for Udomo reaches for the formal capacities of the novel to stage how the process of fo…
Narrative reproduction: Plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust
This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis ar…
Migrant remittances and the frontiers of finance
This essay excavates the material foundations of financialization through a reading of two texts in which migrant remittances are centrally positioned as a financial product that reveals financialization’s own indebtedness to the economic structures of colonial export economies. Both Ousmane Sembène’s post-independence, pre-structural adjustment novella Le mandat or The Money-Order (1965) and Nigerian-American author Okey Ndibe’s post-globalizati…
World literature and commodity Frontiers
This introduction to a special issue on world literature and commodity frontiers elaborates on the methodological premise of the issue. The essays collected here all pursue a form of comparativism grounded in the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. Commodity frontiers are spaces of extraction or production that reorganize land and labour in such a way as to send vast reservoirs of food, energy, raw materials, and labour-…
History (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Politics (3 works) · Social science (3 works)