Summary

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.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Crude Fictions
2. Petrofeminism
3. Petroart
4. Petrohorror
5. Petrocinema
6. Petrodrama
Conclusion
Works Cited

Author

Helen Kapstein is professor of English at John Jay College, The City University of New York. She is the author of Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Her work has appeared in Postcolonial Text, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. She holds a PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University.

Reviews

“Petroforms is a remarkable study of the manifold genres produced not merely by what we in the energy humanities term petromodernity; it attends to those ‘crude’ genres that arise organically from the extraction, refinement and distribution of petroleum within global markets. The central argument—that oil engenders its own forms, because it exceeds the ontological containers available through conventional literary-critical protocols—is one that has often been made in the context of reader reception but not necessarily in terms of artistic production.” 
—Stacey Balkan, associate professor of Environmental Humanities at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India and coauthor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere

“Responding to the sense that oil encounters are difficult to capture in literature, Petroforms demonstrates how literary, filmic, sculptural, and pop-cultural forms from Nigeria stretch and change to represent oil. Helen Kapstein locates this formal stretching not only in documentaries and short stories that portray devastation in the Niger Delta but also in the other face of Nigerian oil: the romance––even the eroticism––of petromodernity for more privileged subjects in Lagos and beyond. Recognizing that petromodernity is classed and regionalized but also gendered, Kapstein foregrounds the ambivalent participation of Nigerian women as both protestors of oil extractivism and beneficiaries of petromodernity. Taking readers from short story to romance novel, sculpture, drama, and even sitcom, Petroforms illustrates the wide-ranging formal innovation prompted by Nigeria’s ongoing enmeshment with oil.”
—B. Jamieson Stanley, associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South

“[A]n urgent intervention into the cultural politics of energy, showing how Nigerian artists make visible and reckon with the costs, consequences, and contradictionsof life in oil zones.”
—Imre Szeman, coeditor of Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

Summary

When a mid-life couple finds an old farm that promises refuge from hectic lives and encroaching illness, their world opens up to unexpected adventures: breeding heritage goats, hogs, and cattle; managing a half-dozen large guardian dogs; dealing with barn fires, rapacious logging, and the death of treasured animals. The farm and the surrounding forest also lead to surprising moments of beauty—from sublime sunsets and powerful connections with animals to an outpouring of help from neighbors.

Written separately by wife and husband with distinctly separate voices, the book’s essays illustrate different perspectives of life on a farm dedicated to the compassionate treatment of livestock and a deep appreciation of nature’s complexities. Priscilla embraces the intensity of loving animals; Henry explores the mysteries of living in a beautiful place. And, in telling their tales, the authors provide a glimpse into their own marriage—as complicated, improbable, and enduring as life itself. The Keep—the term for “the strongest or central tower of a castle, acting as a final refuge”—is a love letter to an unexpected place and adopted lifestyle.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

A Place to Love

Letter to Mom

Mud Between My Toes

Decisions

Tiny Tim

All that the Land Contains

Sid’s Twins

Mindful Meddling

The Dilemma of Loving Hogs

Surprises

Of These Mountains

Early Years

Hercules

Morels on the Mountain

Arnost and the Eagle

“Say What? No Way!”

Hog Gossip

The Duckness

Sex in the Pasture

Hat of Shame

From Power Take Off to Artificial Intelligence

Hard Times

Pedro

Death on the Farm

January 11, The Fire

January 12, The Fire

The Forgiving Land

The Old Oak

Gifts

Winter’s Wood

Unexpected Outcomes

Lucy

Izzy’s Bridge

Home Before Breakfast

Quiet Times

The Pond

On a Summer Breeze

A Fisher’s Solitude

Lovely October

Epilogues

The Near Final

Letter for Alice

Acknowledgements

Author

Henry T. Ireys has a forty-year career as a health policy researcher working for Vanderbilt University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He later became a senior researcher for Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, DC. He published numerous papers in health policy journals and, since his retirement, has been writing for The Hampshire Review about farming and the natural world. He holds a PhD from Case Western Reserve University. Priscilla M. Ireys attended the Pittsburg Institute of Art and FIT in New York. She designed and made stage clothes for country music stars such as Loretta Lynn. Under her own label, she sold expensive handmade scarves to Norstrom’s, Henri Bendel, and many high-end boutiques. She left the fashion industry after thirty years to focus on farming and the conservation of heritage breeds. She has written numerous stories for Small Farmer’s Journal. Together, Henry and Priscilla have lived on a farm in Hampshire County since 2001, tending a core herd of fifty Spanish and Savanna goats. The Keep is their first book together.

Reviews

“The Keep is honest and compelling storytelling told through the contrasting and complementarity of Priscilla’s and Henry’s individual voices. Priscilla has an intimate view of animal husbandry, while Henry is more prone to philosophizing; yet both are deeply engaged with the land, and both are thoughtful and lively storytellers. Neither shies away from complexities and challenges. In her accounts of raising goats and hogs, Priscilla captures both the necessary brutality and profound tenderness required for successful animal husbandry.” 
—Arwen Donahue is the author of the graphic memoir Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year (Hub City, 2022) and the oral history collection This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky, 2022). She lives on a farm in Kentucky.

“A delightful chronicle of a moment in time on a parcel in Appalachia. I enjoyed reading about this couple, their purchase of this land, the way they cared for it, raised a family on it, the hard work of raising goats, other interactions with the natural world and with their neighbors.” 
—Gretchen Legler is the author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life (Trinity University Press, 2022); On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (Milkweed Editions, 2005); and All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook (Milkweed Editions, 1995). She is professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington. Legler holds a PhD in English and feminist studies and a master’s of divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Summary

Artifact is about the stories we tell ourselves after mass shootings. Each college campus shooting leaves a record: archival collections, monuments to the dead, government-led inquiries, internal university investigations, and lawsuits. Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives seeks to understand university and college campus shootings that involve students and faculty of those institutions. The book examines the aftermaths of such attacks by moving between university archives, memorials to victims, conversations with survivors, and beyond.

Julija Šukys examines a series of five North American university and college campus shootings between 1989 and 2015: the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Concordia University in Montreal, Virginia Tech, University of Alabama–Huntsville, and Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. These attacks involved students and faculty as both victims and perpetrators—that is, all the shooters were either faculty members or (in one case, would-be) students of the institution where the killings took place.

Šukys arrives at each site long after the killings have taken place: by now, the teddy bears, flowers, and crosses have been cleared away. Prying journalists are long gone. She sorts through myriad objects left at makeshift memorial sites. She talks for hours with a professor who survived an attack only because her colleague’s gun jammed as it was pointed at her head. She wanders and documents the reconfigured buildings made unrecognizable after the horrors that occurred within them. She reads tedious court transcripts, officious government-commissioned reports, and a troubling memoir written by a shooter’s mother and sifts through the mathematics papers that one campus shooter publishes from his prison cell.

Artifact weighs what it means to live in a place where students and their teachers are gunned down on a seemingly regular basis. It asks how we can continue to learn, teach, and live when nothing changes in response to these deaths. It attempts to speak into silence, to look at the pain of those who have come through trauma, and to meet their gazes without platitudes or triumphalism. The result is a searching book about care, memory, forgiveness, and survival.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Scope and Contents

Box I: A Record of Violence

SERIES 1

Box II: 1989, L’École Polytechnique de Montréal (Montreal, QC)

Folder 1. Winter Storm

Folder 2. Monuments

Box III: 1992, Concordia University (Montreal, QC)

Folder 3. Trapped

Folder 4. Truthtellers

SERIES 2

Box IV: 2007, Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA)

Folder 5. Insiders/Outsiders

Folder 6. Root

Box V: 2010, University of Alabama (Huntsville, AL)

Folder 7. Vengeance Weapon

Folder 8. Forgiveness

SERIES 3

Box VI: 2015, Umpqua Community College (Roseburg, OR)

Folder 9. Timber Country

Folder 10. Bloom

Box VII: A Different Testimony

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Author

Julija Šukys is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where she teaches the writing of memoirs, autobiographical writing, essays, and archival research methods. She is the author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Šukys holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.

Reviews

“But while despairing for change marks the concern for Artifact, despair is not the point. Šukys works through campus shootings to uncover the details of what happened, how it happened, even probing why it happened. Šukys digs into the archives of the event to find research, but also to secure the main motif of the book: If there is any hope that these shootings will stop, we can’t turn away from the situation. We need to dig deep into both the event and into the culture that allowed it to happen. The archives become a metaphor for how we might acknowledge, see, even experience in our own bodies, the causes and effects of these mass killings.” 
—Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster (Torrey House, 2021); Sustainability: A Love Story (Mad Creek Books, 2018); Egg (Object Lessons Series, Bloomsbury, 2017); and Micrograms (New Michigan Press, 2016). She is professor of English and MFA program director at Northern Arizona University.

“An elegant mixture of the personal and the historical. Šukys’s engaging journey invites the reader to feel the pull of the archive, and the many twists and turns of the search.”
—Philip Nel is author of How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children’s Classic and is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University

Sukys

Summary

You may have heard it at a football game, in an advertisement, or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand, at Oktoberfest in Belgium, or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays, the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is ubiquitous, unmistakable, universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver in 1971, the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences, carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages. 

This book examines “Country Roads” as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining “Country Roads” as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, this work untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

The Song Is a Memory (an Introduction)

Chapter 2

Hiraeth, Home, and West Virginian Rhetorics of Identity

Chapter 3

Placing “Country Roads” in Context

Chapter 4

A West Virginia State of Mind

Chapter 5

Evoking (and Marketing) Belonging and Home

Chapter 6

The Window, the Mirror, and the Lens: Pedagogical Implications

References

Index

Author

Sarah L. Morris is assistant professor in the department of English and coordinator of undergraduate writing at West Virginia University. She is also co-director of WVU’s National Writing Project. Morris holds an MA in English / Language Arts Teacher Education from WVU and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland. This is her first book.

Reviews

“This brilliant, heartfelt work belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in regional West Virginia and Appalachian studies. Morris’s thoughtful exploration of the ways we are shaped by music and public rhetoric has relevance for people in all places and all walks of life. I never knew how much ‘Country Roads’ could teach me about identity in all its complexities until I read this book.”
—Amanda E. Hayes, author of The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric (WVU Press, 2018) and The Madison Women: Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia (WVU Press, 2024)

"This book offers a compelling exploration of 'Country Roads' as a song of global resonance—tracing how a distinctly American ballad came to embody a universal sense of belonging and longing for home."
—Debra Lattanzi Shutika, author of Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexicoand associate professor of folklore at George Mason University

Summary

“How would our lives change,” wondered entrepreneur Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard in 1987, “if everyday people had a stable, high-speed data connection to the Internet?” While he wasn’t the first to imagine a world of digital connectivity, Yassini-Fard was in the vanguard by creating the cable modem, which transformed residential Internet access from its slow, frustrating dial-up origins to a fast, always-on, and extraordinary connectivity tool by harnessing the existing infrastructure of the residential cable network.

The Accidental Network tells the untold story of the invention of the cable modem by the small, struggling tech company LANcity in the early 1990s, illustrating how Yassini-Fard overcame a cascade of technical challenges, investment community naysayers, and unnerving business obstacles to create the cable modem technology that has changed the way billions of individuals across the globe now manage their daily lives and commerce. The cable modem delivered broadband, with speeds ranging from 10 megabits per second (Mbps) to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps)—a big leap from the dial-up speeds of 56 kilobits per second (Kbps). This platform, along with the adoption of the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard, engendered the modern revolution in broadband internet access. Shunned by venture capitalists and surviving on a shoestring budget, Yassini-Fard and his colleagues were willing to bet it all (including the deed for Yassini-Fard’s home) on the creation of the cable modem and the pursuit of global adoption.

The Accidental Network is both a valuable history of technology innovation and an engrossing account of business conducted at high speed. The book details Yassini-Fard’s journey from electrical engineer to entrepreneur in the race to secure technology partners, create a wholly new marketplace, and convince cable industry executives that a bold business awaited in transmitting data to households at a time when skepticism about the reach of personal computing was the norm.

Written from the lens of a devoted idealist and WVU alum known as “the father of the cable modem,” this book reveals how a perfect storm of forces—the rise of cable television, the onset of the personal computing era, a growing awareness of the Internet for information and commerce, and the development of the cable modem—converged to usher in the age of broadband access.

Contents

Foreword by John Chambers

Prologue

1 American Dream

2 Wired Nation

3 Vision Quest 

4 It’s a Deal

5 The Missing Link

6 When Doves Fly

7 Death Star

8 Puppy Love

9 Screen Wars

10 Rose Gardening

11 Wicked Fast

12 Father Figure

Epilogue: A New Alphabet

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Authors

Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard is a technology entrepreneur and philanthropist whose Massachusetts-based organization, YAS Foundation, supports innovation and creativity, addressing medical technology, telecommunications advocacy, educational scholarship, and cultural collaboration. His is widely known as the "father of the cable modem," tracing back to the breakthrough achievements around high-speed data technology pioneered by LANcity, a company Yassini-Fard founded in 1988.

Stewart Schley is a journalist who writes about the business of media and telecommunications. He is the founding editor of Cable World magazine.

John Chambers is founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures and former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco.

Reviews

“The cable modem did more than speed up the Internet—it accelerated the future. This book tells how it all began.”
—Mark Robichaux, author of Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business

“Broadband is the most beloved technology in the world. The invention of the cable modem opened the door to always-on, fast Internet access that put to rest the crude experience of dial-up. In doing so it unleashed a torrent of innovation and gave rise to the Information Age. Yassini-Fard, famed inventor of the cable modem, expertly tells one of the great American success stories.”
—Michael K. Powell, president and CEO, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association [2011 - 2025], chairman, United States Federal Communications Commission [2001 - 2005]

“Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard led the vision for the cable industry that the cable plant could provide Internet to your home. The pioneering work that Rouzbeh and his team did at LANcity was the embodiment of that vision and ultimately led to the creation of DOCSIS. We, the DOCSIS generation, stand on the shoulders of giants, and Rouzbeh and his team were those giants. This book is a fascinating read of life in a startup and compares to great books like The Soul of a New Machine. Rouzbeh’s book shows what you can do with a vision even when all the odds seem against you.”
—John Chapman, former Broadband CTO and Fellow, Cisco

"A fascinating story of the vision and innovation that transformed a network for distributing analog video into a modern broadband access network that now touches almost every aspect of our lives."
—Dr. Surinder Kumar, founder and chairman, Vecima Networks

“From a venture investor's perspective, broadband did much more than increase internet speeds—it created the essential foundation for streaming services and social media platforms to exist. Rouzbeh Yassini’s visionary insight in creating the first residential cable modem helped investors see for themselves that broadband enabled entirely new business models and consumer behaviors, ultimately unlocking trillions in market value from companies that simply couldn't have existed before.”
—David Aronoff, chairman and managing partner, MCJ

“A good telling of the story of the invention of the cable modem.” 
—Peter Jones is distinguished engineer at Cisco and an active  member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

"In this compelling first-hand account of the development and commercialization of the cable modem, Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard shares personal stories as well as deep technical and industry insights. While the Internet's history has been told before in the context of the traditional telecommunication industry, The Accidental Network offers a fresh perspective through the lens of television networks and cable operators. This book is a valuable addition for netowrk technologists-many of whom are unfamiliar with cable television- as well as the technically interested reader who is intrigued by how our digital infrastructure became as pervasive as it is."
—Alex Bochannek, curator, Computer History Museum

“The rise of home-based broadband was a transformative moment in personal communication, creativity, knowledge creation and human relations. At the center of that story is Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard: energetic immigrant, hustling entrepreneur, and inventor of the cable modem. His success was hardly foreordained. His narrative is full of grit, drama, and big personalities. This engrossing book brings to life a prototypical American tale that shows how an inspired, smart citizen can help change the world.”
—Lee Rainie, Director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, Elon University and former director of The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project