Confluence

Abstract

From the Latin confluere, meaning "flow together," "confluence" refers to "the junction of two rivers," or, more broadly, "an act or process of merging" (OED).  I am working on an art project entitled Confluence, in which I paint a large map of watersheds with water and sediment from the Otonabee River ("the river that beats like a heart" in Nishinaabemowin) in my home in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, Ontario and the South Saskatchewan River (kisiskâciwanisîpiy, "swift-flowing river" in Cree), in a small act of merging these bodies of water that are geographically disparate, yet ultimately connected via the water cycle, movements, and histories.  Both of these rivers acted as vital travel and trade routes for Indigenous nations before settler arrival, and both rivers and their environs bear the marks of settler-colonialism in the form of dams and other infrastructure that have impacted (and continue to impact in many ways), sometimes fatally, Indigenous peoples as well as species such as bison and sturgeon in the Saskatchewan river basin, and Atlantic salmon and American eel in the Otonabee.  Convening the water from these rivers is a symbolic gesture of connection and consideration across distance and through time.

Bio

I respectfully acknowledge that in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough Ontario, I am living and working on the traditional territory and treaties of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg.  I offer my gratitude to First Peoples for their care for, and teachings about, our earth and our relations.  May we honour those teachings, and do justice to our treaty responsibilities.

如水無形 “be like water” /  填海 “fill the sea”: Ecological and Political Resistance in Hong Kong

Abstract

2019 marked a watershed moment in Hong Kong politics with the eruption of widespread and often times violent protests against its pro-Beijing government’s attempts to curtail its citizens’ rights. This paper is a reflection on the complex coastal watershed of Hong Kong, and the intersections of the ecological, political, and literary in its ongoing processes of land reclamation. I consider the diametrically opposite concepts of “be like water” and “fill the sea” (a direct translation of the Cantonese term for land reclamation). I read the ecologies of protest in tandem with the environmental devastation of Hong Kong’s coastlines wrought by decades of colonial and (post)colonial urban planning and development, where land reclamation works in favour of producing more disciplinary spaces in the city.  What might a situated, ecocritical reading of Hong Kong’s changing coastlines provide in an era of diminishing freedoms? I draw from an archive of urban planning briefs for the new West Kowloon Cultural District, interviews with activist-writers, and oral histories of some of the last fishermen in Victoria Harbour, and my own audiovisual field recordings. What might we learn from the watersheds of Hong Kong? What does it mean to be like water when the powers seem intent on filling in the sea?

Bio

Joanne Leow is grateful to live and work as a guest on Treaty Six Territory and the homeland of the Métis. She is Assistant Professor of decolonizing, diasporic, and transnational literatures at the University of Saskatchewan. Her most recent research is published or forthcoming in positions: asia critique, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies. Her book manuscript, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Against the Mapped City theorizes the tactics of spatial, aesthetic, and literary dissidence in contemporary Singapore. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. Her ecocritical SSHRC-funded project, “Intertidal Polyphonies,” documents urban ecologies in Singapore, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, and is available at intertidal.usask.ca

Making a Counterhegemonic Language

Abstract

What might it look like to place shared water at the heart of struggles for social transformation? This paper imagines a possible “not-yet language of hydrophilia” which would load water with counterhegemonic meanings and aspirational visions. From the #NoDAPL uprising at Standing Rock, to the Lavalas movement in Haiti, to slogans like “Water Not Walls” and “Like the Seas, We Rise” social movements are already cultivating and channeling the powerful emotional resonances of water. What if these already-existing symbols, metaphors and metonyms were just the embryonic expressions of a cohesive counterhegemonic language? Water – along with its multivalent aspirational meanings – could serve as a focal point for Left social movements, with colonialism, capitalism, racism, heteropatriarchy, climate breakdown, and other forms and manifestations of oppression redefined in opposition to this central term. As both a symbol and as a site of struggle, water might be engaged to heal conditions of fracture at multiple scales and to mediate powerful and expansive forms of solidarity.

Bio

Janine MacLeod is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She is the co-editor of Thinking with Water (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in scholarly collections such as Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (McGill-Queen’s Univerity Press, 2017) and Downstream: Reimagining Water (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2017) as well as in publications like The Walrus magazine and the Vancouver Observer. She lives on Tla’amin territory.