Aqueous Territory: Learning from Louisiana's Colonial Histories and Watery Extremes

Global climate change is affecting the popular Western cultural perception of water as a stable resource. In the UK, major flood events have occurred every year since 2007 due to rainfall increases of 17% per year (Guardian, Feb. 2020); in the Southern US, hurricanes battering the Gulf Coast have increased by 15% since 1970 (Washington Post, Sept. 2020). Though citizens of both countries are calling on politicians to counteract such increasingly extreme weather phenomena through better infrastructure, the lackluster political response dramatically reveals the extent to which water's consistent presence, and the ability to control its fluidity, are still taken for granted.

In the Mississippi River Valley Basin (MRVB)--a region hard hit by climate change today--water's instability has been historically and visually documented from 1690 as a determinant factor in the livelihood of Indigenous Peoples and colonial settlers. The proposed Aqueous Territory Network aims to study and interrogate the material and oral histories of water's role in those societies that developed in the MRVB during the last 350 years: from the maps and texts of agronomist-engineer A-S. Le Page du Pratz (1695-1775) to the graffiti murals of contemporary African American artist B. Odums in buildings left abandoned since they were flooded in Hurricane Katrina (2005). These aqueous histories of the MRVB visualize the environmental challenges and social consequences of inequitable water distribution and its control mechanisms; more hopefully, parts of this long historical record also offer a blueprint for successfully managing an intemperate climate through cultural, infrastructural, and environmental actions. By bringing together researchers from the arts, humanities, social, and hard sciences to investigate the watery interfaces between history, biology, language, urban engineering, story-telling, politics, environment, policing, and the human body, the network will transcend the nature/culture divide--physically confronting the MRVB's ecosystem while critically examining human dependencies on it.

The network's research contends that the MRVB's historical and current relationship to aqueous extremes can be productively compared with issues that British estuarine communities are facing today, including: resource allocation, flood control, and sustainable conservation. This micro-analytic comparative focus, researched by an interdisciplinary team, will use past and present examples in the MRVB as a blueprint for shaping socio-climatic interactions in an increasingly wet Britain.

The network will accomplish its collective research goals by meeting frequently to exchange ideas, initially online in Fall 2021. Along with other invited field experts, the network members will then meet in Louisiana in May 2022. Through collective visits to various historical sites which are flashpoints in the debate on the importance of aqueousness to the MRVB--such as New Orleans's levees--as well as a conference featuring artists and activists from Indigenous and African American communities, we will identify interfaces between practical, historical, and social concerns that govern the treatment of aqueousness in the MRVB today. Over the next 10 months, the network members will develop their individual research, including creative and scholarly writing as well as musical composition. They shall keep in touch through online meetings involving colleagues dealing with similar themes of aqueousness in British estuarine communities. Collective research results on aqueousness in the MRVB and Britain will be published in a special issue of 'Humanities' (peer-reviewed), edited by the Pi and Co-I. The network's research will also be presented at the University of Exeter, UK, at a conference/performance in May 2023. The free, community-driven performance will feature network participants' poetry, prose, and music compositions, interpreted by local student music groups.