‘Water in the Anthropocene .’

Kluwick, Ursula Maria (10 September 2019). ‘Water in the Anthropocene .’ (Unpublished). In: Anthropocene (Post)Humanities. Bayrische Akademie München. 10.-11.9.2019.

This paper examines the entanglement between humans, technology, and environment in contemporary water novels. Novels such as Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994), and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) explore the effects of human actions on aquatic landscapes but also how the latter in their turn influence human ways of life as well as individual life stories. While technologies such as drainage, canal building and dam construction, but also the effects of climate change and examples of ecological destruction as results of slow violence demonstrate how nature is altered by humans, the representation of natural disasters, such as tsunamis or flooding, in these texts foregrounds the multi-directional interactions between human characters and their environment. In addition, the novels discussed in this paper explore the affective relations between their human protagonists and the waterscapes in which they live, as well as the aquatic events with which they have to engage.
My paper approaches these water novels from the perspective of new materialism in order to emphasise interaction and enmeshment. At the same time, it also proposes Patrick D. Murphy’s concept of anotherness as a tool that can work against the potential lack of differentiation and indiscriminate levelling of unequal relations that accompanies the “new universalism”.

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