The panel “Global South Waters” aims at exploring diverse literary genres and their relation with the theme of water in postcolonial environments (Africa and Oceania). We will delve into what has been described as the “hydrological turn” and the “blue humanities”. The writers and artists under scrutiny explore the aesthetic and political stakes underlying water, from an eco-decolonial point of view. They also contribute to (re)thinking water as method of knowledge production and circulation, and to developing a universal approach to water. All four speakers will engage in the decolonial “delinking” process by moving away from a Eurocentric vision of the world, and will address the “entangled arena of the more-than-human world” (Ibrisim), “the genealogical connections between Oceanians, aquatic other-than-humans, and the largest body of water on the planet” (Maurer), the “reclaiming [of] wetlands lost to ‘Reclamation’ in Southern Mauritania” (Watts), and “cultures that have always thought about and with water” (Courtois). A significant portion of this panel is prompted by the intellectual challenge posed by the Anthropocene era. It demonstrates that “Global South Waters” encapsulate a realm that makes visible and challenges conventional dichotomies prevalent in studies of nations, colonialism, race, religion, and culture.

While Euroamerican academic circles have repeatedly called for a turn to the “blue humanities”, the Global South has not needed such a “turn” to foreground water because it has always been at the centre of its cultural, artistic, and political framework. Waterways structurally inform arts and literatures from the global south. It deserves a specific kind of theoretical attention, foregrounding places and spaces at the empire’s margin, a process often sidelined in the more universalist “Blue Humanities.”

By adopting “blue humanist” perspectives, the speakers will all dialogue with issues that have been central in the Humanities. The approach adopted in the panel “Global South Waters” is comparative, and will help launch fruitful dialogues between various (literary and artistic) cultures. The materiality and agency of water, water as method, will be at the centre of our approach.

There will be 4 speakers. The presider’s words will be brief (5 min). Each speaker will be allotted 13 minutes maximum for their paper, in order to keep 15+ minutes for an unstructured discussion.

Maurer will analyze what forms solidarity and regeneration can take in the aftermath of the militarized destruction of waterways in Oceania. Exploring artistic works by antinuclear artists, she argues that Pacific storytelling finds inspiration in traditional Indigenous aesthetics to nurture the genealogical connections between Oceanians, aquatic other-than-humans, and the largest body of water on the planet in a context of an extreme form of colonial aggression: the detonation of nuclear bombs.

Ibrisim will examine Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea through blue humanist perspectives. She will argue that the Indian Ocean surfaces as a mnemonic space in which to re-envision the entanglements created by transcultural encounters between Africa, China, and Turkey in the past and the present. She will introduce the concept of “slow wit(h)nessing,” a form of witnessing that is an open-ended and permeable act which is significantly constituted by slow and entangled interactions and exchanges among humans and bodies of water.

Watts will analyse the work of Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, who is intervening directly in the water crisis at Tambass, as well as a number of artists who create counter-narratives around water in Mauritania that aim to “reclaim” it from the extractivist, colonialist logics of the state and non-state actors.

Courtois will adopt a blue humanist approach on Mulgrew and Szczurek’s Water and Okri’s Tiger Work. The writers under study explore the aesthetic and political stakes underlying water, from an afrocentric viewpoint. In the context of the “Wasteocene”, Courtois will argue that they adopt a decolonial approach by bringing to the fore cultures that have always thought about and with water in order to draw the reader’s attention towards the plight of water bodies.

Each of us challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly been organized around Euro-American reference points and hence we create a diversity of voices. Through the lens of decoloniality, our aim is to cultivate a plural, diverse and multilingual archive for imagining “Global South Waters”. Two of us are based in the US, one of us in Turkey, one of us in France. This allows for a diversity of approaches and a variety of corpuses.