Our panel centers rivers as critical sites for rethinking empire, globalization, and environmental thought. Rivers have historically served as arteries of empires, facilitating trade, industry, plantation, settlement, and governance. Empires have sought to discipline rivers through dams, canals, mapping, and hydraulic engineering. But rivers also resist instrumentalization. Their shifting courses, periodic flooding, ecological complexity, and regional epistemologies disrupt imperial attempts at stabilization and mastery. This hybridity of rivers, as means of power and resistance, is a fertile ground for literary-cultural analysis.

While addressing the paucity of literary-critical work around rivers, we draw from the wider environmental humanities scholarship such as Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), Leanne Simpson’s Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025), Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (2025), Richard White’s The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995), and Dilip da Cunha’s The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent (2019). These works think with rivers to theorize radical embodiment and relation (Neimanis and Simpson), the rights of nature (Macfarlane), and the artificial distinction between nature and culture (White, da Cunha). Our panel contributes the much needed literary-critical perspective to this ongoing conversation.

The panel features four speakers presenting on real and imaginary rivers from four different regions. Amanda Louise Johnson starts by looking at the Ohio river as a shifting border between enslaved and free states throughout the nineteenth century. While the antebellum texts depict the river as an escape route, Johnson argues that later infrastructures— canals, bridges, railways— reconfigure it as both barrier and conduit. Tracing this infrastructural history through print culture, Johnson shows how the river’s meaning evolves from East-West divide to North-South border, revealing how both time and space become fluid in the Anglo-American colonialist imagination.

In the next presentation, Stephen Buttes analyzes the Latin American debt crises beginning in the 1970s alongside the rise of human-made climate change. Reading rivers and wetlands in Hernán Ronsino’s Una música (2022) and Andreas Fontana’s Azor (2021), he argues that the wetland-river dynamic reveals a shared temporality of climate and finance, offering a framework for responding to what we inherit from the past—capital and infrastructure along with political, economic, social, and aesthetic models—so as to confront, through the actions we take today, the opportunities and liabilities embedded within the crises.

From the Americas, we move to the Thames and the Tigris in Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim’s reading of Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024). Ibrisim demonstrates that the fictionalized rivers not only represent their material histories of instrumentalization, but also carry sedimented histories of violence, displacement, and survival. Drawing on hydrofeminism and more-than-human care theory, she argues that the rivers here archive colonial and postcolonial trauma not as discrete events, but as durational, recursive processes embedded in ecological cycles.

Finally, Surojit Kayal takes us to the Sundarbans, a forested and deltaic borderland between India and Bangladesh, where three major South Asian rivers drain into the Indian ocean. Kayal theorizes the delta as an epistemology that unsettles epistemic separations such as land/water, nature/society, human/animal. These separations, Kayal argues, form the bedrock of (post)colonial projects such as nation states, development, and conservation. In contrast, the delta undermines fixed categories and prioritizes messiness, uncertainty, and multisensory perception. Kayal maps this aesthetically; through a study of vernacular and anglophone literature of the Sundarbans, he theorizes an extractive realism of colonial governance and the deltaic realism of the Sundarbans’ resistance.

The panel keeps each presentation to a strict limit of thirteen minutes in order to ensure plenty of time for discussion. The panel’s larger goal is to help establish river studies as a subfield of post/decolonial studies and environmental humanities. In doing so, we also hope to contribute meaningfully to the MLA presidential theme of emancipatory narratives.