A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at
www.luminosoa.org.
Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse.
This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid identities, and cultural currencies. The first section deals with the properties of water and the ways in which water challenges human plans for control. The second section explores how water (or lack of it) shapes human collective and individual identities. The third engages notions of value and circulation to think about how water has been managed and employed for local, national, and international gains. Contributions come from preeminent as well as emerging voices across humanities fields including history, art history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. Part of a bigger goal for shaping the environmental humanities, the book broadens the concept of water to include not just water in oceans and rivers but also in pipes, ice floes, marshes, bottles, dams, and more. Each piece shows how humanities scholarship has world-changing potential to achieve more just water futures.
Kim De Wolff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas.
Rina C. Faletti is an exhibition curator and researcher in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced.
Ignacio López-Calvo is UC Merced Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Latin American Literature.
"This fascinating essay collection, drawn from the nascent field of the environmental humanities, breaks new ground with its interdisciplinary insights into the multifaceted relations between water and human societies. The essays range across diverse themes including alternative hydrological imaginaries and decolonial perspectives on water engineering."––Matthew Gandy, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination
"Water's power, purpose, and meaning cannot be contained by any one scholarly discipline. Understanding the value of water in a time of climate catastrophe demands more-than-human humanities, and Hydrohumanities answers this call."––Astrida Niemanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
"Hydrohumanities demonstrates how the humanities play a leadership role in envisioning and enacting social, cultural, and infrastructural change in an era of scarce resources, slow violence, and climate emergency. The essays provocatively think with water through its shape-shifting, agential qualities, and the results channel new possibilities for the planet's aquatic future."––Laura Winkiel, author of Modernism, Race, and Manifestos and editor of "Hydro-criticism," a special issue of English Language Notes
"Hydrohumanities establishes studies of water as an urgent, central topic in the environmental humanities. It recognizes that water is not simply a commodity, but has agency; that water can both define and destabilize economic, symbolic, magical, and salvational identities; that water is inseparable from mapping region and nation; and that therefore water is always inseparable from political culture."––David E. Nye, author of Conflicted American Landscapes and American Technological Sublime
"This book calls for a humanities that attends to animal, plant, fungal, and microbial power as well as to those geological, hydrological, and machine-like forces that operate as agencies out of full human control. Hydrohumanities speaks fluently and fluidly about power, human and nonhuman, all the way through." ––Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
270 pp.6 x 9Illus: 31 color illustrations
9780520380455$34.95|£30.00Paper
Dec 2021