Water Worlds in Literary Imagination

This interdisciplinary course surveys literary, cinematic, historical and other archival text representations of time and change in and around waterways in the Global South—oceanic, riverine, at the littoral and in hinterlands. It is animated by questions of how people live with water as horizon, resource, life-giving source, as ancestral boundaries and threat. We do so now in a time when climate change refocuses our dependencies upon, and vulnerabilities to, water.

Our themes are shaped by water’s influence on the rhythms of lives, and how these rhythms have been changed and are changing—deliberately, as in dam building and its aftermaths in lives, and through climate change.