Water and Oil: On Environmental Orientalisms

From Everyday Orientalism Podcast · 54:34

Show by Girish Daswani

This week we welcome Joanne Leow and Yasmine Hafez to discuss the ways in which water in Egypt and oil in Singapore function as expressions of extractive capitalism. We talk about what hides between the fictive narratives of Singapore’s gardens, the ways in which ecocide and environmental destruction elsewhere enable tourism and growth at home, and how state battles over the control of the Nile negatively impact the lives of local peoples. Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent publication is the hybrid memoir Exhumations: In the Body of a Petrostate, from Alchemy Press, 2026. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project, Intertidal Polyphonies: Sound, Text, Art, archiving the contemporary shorelines of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver, in collaboration with artists, activists, and writers from each city.Yasmine Hafez has recently completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London, and is a Fellow at the Water Diplomacy Center at Jordan University of Science and Technology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Nile Basin and extensive archival research, her work examines power dynamics in water management and traces the long-term political, social, and ecological processes shaping water governance and environmental justice. She has worked closely with civil society actors and contributed to several publications on water politics and ecological struggles.Additional Resources: Yasmine’s article, “Why You Are Not Doing Fieldwork at Home”The book connected to this project, which brings together fieldwork experiences from different researchers—currently available for pre-order and will be out soon.Amitav Ghosh on petrofictionsJoshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing. 2016. “Paramilitary Gardening: Landscape and Authoritarianism”Kalyanee Mam’s short film, “Lost World”The “Songs on the Nile” playlist, collected by Yasmine and colleagues, and The paper connected to the “Songs on the Nile” playlistThe Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism.Host: Girish DaswaniEditor and producer: Taylor StarkResearch assistant: Sophie PlotkinIntro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

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