Extended deadline: March 22
Across the African continent processes and technologies of nineteenth-century European imperialism, especially land treaties, weaponized rivers, lakes, and streams as frontiers demarcating colonial reach. In contrast, indigenous relationships to water foregrounded an alternative knowledge: that large and small water bodies served as vital passages to the supernatural. For example, between 1904 and 1911 while the British Crown deployed the Mara, Olkejuado, Merueshi, and Ngatatoek rivers as borders delineating England’s sphere of influence, indigenous Maa peoples of present-day Kenya and Tanzania described the same geographical features as life-giving spaces supportive of a nomadic culture.
What are the varied ways that communities have imagined water, water bodies (large and small), and waterscapes across the African continent and in the diaspora? How do waters and water bodies feature in various modes of storytelling: oral, written, poetry, music, folklore, and so on? How have African communities articulated the connection(s) between the allegorical and physical aspects of water? How do gender concerns intersect with water? How do communities navigate and conceptualize water as both sustenance yet potentially destructive? Finally, how have indigenous epistemologies of water survived or transformed across political eras of independence, state building, neoliberalism, and globalization?
Kindly submit 250-word abstracts by March 22, 2024 11:59 PM EST. You may email proposal to Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri at muchiri@unl.edu
