Description
An experiment in reading for water, this book offers students and teachers a toolkit of methods that follow the sensory, political and agentive power of water across literary texts.
The chapters in this book follow rivers, rain, streams, tunnels and sewers; connect atmospheric, surface and ground water; describe competing hydrological traditions and hydro-epistemologies. They propose new literary regions defined less by nation and area than by coastlines, river basins, monsoons, currents and hydro-cosmologies. Whether thinking along water courses, below the water line, or through the fall of precipitation, Reading for Water moves laterally, vertically and contrapuntally between different water-worlds and hydro-imaginaries. Addressing southern African and Caribbean texts, the collection draws on a range of elementally inclined literary approaches: critical oceanic studies, new materialisms, coastal and hydrocritical approaches, hydrocolonialism, black hydropoetics and atmospheric methods.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Reading for Water
Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery
1. On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift
Sarah Nuttall
2. Hydrocolonial Johannesburg
Louise Bethlehem
3. Postcolonial Plumbing: Reading for Wastewater in Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue
Charne Lavery
4. Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s Water Crisis
Hedley Twidle
5. A Mermaid in a Dry City: A Watery Reading of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
Confidence Joseph
6. Words on Black Water: Setting South African "Plantation Literature" Afloat on the Kala Pani
Nafisa Essop Sheik
7. Dark Water: Rustum Kozain’s This Carting Life (2005)
Simon Van Schalkwyk
8. "Does the Water Repeat?" Reading Caribbean-South African Contemporary Fiction
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi
9. Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital? Water Priva(tisa)tion and Ontology Reimagined in Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water
Philip Aghoghovwia
10. Shipwreck and Psychosis: Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways
Michael Titlestad
11. Anomalous, Containerized and Inundating Waters: Thinking from the Cape and through Blue Focalization with K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents
Meg Samuelson
