![]() Drawing from current thinking in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, this article proposes the idea of hydropoetics as an outlook on rivers based on the ancient idea of poiesis. In addition to pragmatic conservation measures, the long‐term wellbeing of rivers requires new perspectives on human–water relations that call attention to-and nurture-the cultural, social, and spiritual significance of riverscapes. Valued in utilitarian terms as channels for industry, agriculture, and urban development, rivers are among the most biodiverse yet degraded ecosystems globally. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. In this recent scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases (MOBs), high seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs) and maritime “choke points.” Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a 21st century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. As such, the ocean has come into being as “wet matter” rather than inert backdrop. This is a welcome move after decades of scholarship that positioned the ocean as an anthropocentric and colonial aqua nullius a blank space across which a diasporic masculinity might be forged. Recently scholars have called for a “critical ocean studies” for the 21st century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |