Water Narratives: Imagining Global Environmental Change in the Francophone Post/Colonial World

FAIN: FT-58710-11

Richard Henry Watts
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

This book project considers disruptions in relations to life's most crucial element, fresh water, in the time of global environmental change and details the cultural effects that these changes produce. Ever more precarious access to fresh water as well as perceived changes in water's composition as a result of increasingly widespread pollution have transformed its uses and meaning in literature, cinema, and other forms of cultural production. The notion that water can have a timeless symbolic value has been shaken, and that is perhaps nowhere truer than in the postcolonial world, where the water crisis, for both historical and geographical reasons, is most acutely felt. Beyond its postcolonial focus, the study has a further French Studies specificity: texts from the francophone postcolonies (sub-Saharan Africa, Maghreb, Caribbean, Vietnam) convey that water's use value and symbolic value are in great flux and that this instability is inextricable from past and present ties to France.

Associated Products

Poisoned Animal, Polluted Form: Chamoiseau’s Birds at the Limits of Allegory (Article)
Title: Poisoned Animal, Polluted Form: Chamoiseau’s Birds at the Limits of Allegory
Author: Richard Watts
Abstract: This essay, in a special issue of Pacific Coast Philology devoted to the environmental humanities, considers how modes of reading (e.g., reading animal allegory as a reflection of strictly human concerns) are disrupted in narratives of environmental harm, which oblige us view the connections between the human and non-human realms. The essay uses Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Les neuf consciences du malfini, an animal tale centrally concerned with habitat toxicity in Martinique, as its exemplary text.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.pamla.org/pacific-coast-philology
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Pacific Coast Philology
Publisher: Logos Press

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