Reading for Water

Materiality and Method

Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Sarah Nuttall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Sarah Nuttall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032516295
• eBook ISBN: 9781000937138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

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

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Reading for Water
• 1 On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift
• 2 Hydrocolonial Johannesburg
• 3 Postcolonial Plumbing: Reading for Wastewater in Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue
• 4 Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s Water Crisis
• 5 A Mermaid in a Dry City: A Watery Reading of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
• 6 Words on Black Water: Setting South African “Plantation Literature” Afloat on the Kala Pani
• 7 Dark Water: Rustum Kozain’s This Carting Life (2005)
• 8 “Does the Water Repeat?” Reading Caribbean-South African Contemporary Fiction
• 9 Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital? Water Priva(tisa)tion and Ontology Reimagined in Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water
• 10 Shipwreck and Psychosis: Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways
• 11 Anomalous, Containerized and Inundating Waters: Thinking from the Cape and through Blue Focalization with K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents
• Index