This panel brings a transnational perspective to the cultural and literary histories of water in the Global South. The rise of the blue humanities has brought a spotlight to water in a range of aesthetic media, narrative forms, and historical contexts. This body of interdisciplinary scholarship critiques land-based and anthropocentric biases in the humanities, developing new methods for understanding how water shapes transnational migratory and cultural flows. Exemplary recent works include Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media (Duke, 2020); Margaret Cohen’s The Underwater Eye (Princeton, 2022); and Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (Basic Books, 2022). This panel bridges infrastructural and elemental approaches to the blue humanities across the Global South, stimulating new conversation about the material roots of cultural production, and inviting discussions that think about critical and creative texts with and/through water.

In keeping with the convention theme of “family resemblances,” our panelists will amplify the unexpected resonances among the disparate national, geopolitical, and environmental settings in which they work. Claire Roosien will open the panel with “The Hydroaesthetics of Socialist Realism.” Roosien focuses on works from Central Asia, where irrigation was essential for Stalin’s project to collectivize agriculture in the region. Founding father of Socialist Realism Maxim Gorky espoused it as an unquestionably extractive mode for “cultivating people as rational exploiters of the energies of nature,” but Roosien considers two case studies that complicate that understanding: Humanity’s War With Water, which uses the conventions of a Persianate epic poem (1934) to narrate the construction of an irrigation canal in Tajikistan; and No Return (1978), which attempted to adapt the Socialist Realist production novel for a story about environmental preservation in the Aral Sea region. Read through the lens of water, Socialist Realist narrative emerges as a site for negotiating emergent understandings of nature, culture, and eventually, disaster.

Comfort Azubuko-Udah turns to the politics of water as a daily necessity in sub-Saharan Africa. Her paper, “Unstoried Ubiquity: Structural Silences and Domestic Hydroscapes in Nigerian Literature,” begins from the observation that despite the central and essential place of potable water in everyday living, when it comes to domestic water sourcing and supply in urban Nigerian contexts, there is a notable dearth of literary and narrative attentiveness. These domestic hydroscapes – fraught as they are with failing or nonexistent municipal infrastructure – seem to repel the imaginative engagement afforded by literary fiction. Azubuko-Udah asks: why is such a ubiquitous concern of everyday life so largely absent from Nigeria’s realist fiction? And, if we were to attend to it, what kind of work could it do for the narrativization of African urbanity? In what ways does the mundane domesticity of potable water enable narrative interventions and significations?

If Azubuko-Udah and Roosien focus on hydraulic infrastructures, in his paper “Fluid Agency: Tales of Water in Contemporary Taiwan,” Nicolai Volland will turn to water as an elemental force in the novels of Wu Ming-yi (b. 1971), one of contemporary Taiwan’s most celebrated writers. Wu’s sustained interest in ecological questions has been widely acknowledged. Volland’s paper, however, goes a step further, proposing to read Wu’s fiction as hydrotexts: literary works in/to which water is constitutive. Volland argues that novels such as The Man with the Compound Eyes (Fuyan ren, 2011) and Sea Breeze Hotel (Haifeng jiudian, 2023) are not only set in aqueous environments, but in fact revolve around various form of water. Water, as a nonhuman agent, becomes an autonomous entity in Wu Ming-yi’s novels that assumes both narrative and formal functions. In its various manifestations, water not only drives the plot but offers an innovative conceptual model of reading and engaging literary texts.

The three contributions, covering a wide range of geographies and languages, are concerned with the question of how material environments shape literary and cultural form. Water sustains human and nonhuman life, covers 78% of the earth’s surface, and appears in numerous shapes and forms. It permeates a surprising number of literary texts across cultures. To formulate a vocabulary and an analytical framework to understand these texts in the goal of this session.

Responding to the presentations is Margaret Cohen, a leading scholar in the oceanic humanities.

This panel incorporates scholars working at multiple institutions across North America and hailing from both North America and regions of the Global South. Panelists will be limited to 15 minutes per presentation in order to allow for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.