Reimagining Flooding in the Era of Climate Change: What Environmental History Offers to Navigate a Watery World

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

As disasters intensify around water in the era of climate change, the environmental humanities return to the past to speculate on our environmental futures. Scholars like Dilip da Cunha, James Scott, Richard White, and Ellen Wohl debate the concept of flooding as something ‘natural’ or as a posited delineation of the State for control over local populations. This debate hinges on the enforcement of categories of ‘river’ and ‘floodplain’ and who (or what) can or cannot access these spaces for the means of life. Thus, it cannot be overlooked that the design devices for the marking of water as a line on a map are a tool of civilization and colonialism. Taking this consideration into account when other scholars have overlooked it, this panel examines moments when the excesses of rain challenged the line between river and land, and thereby also the power of the State in communities.



Specifically, this panel uses a comparative method of contestations between Indigenous persons and imperial powers over how to navigate a watery world. Brock Cutler reads the flood of 1868 and 2001 in Algiers as markers of how “disaster” – in this case both drought and flood – is constructed through repeated claims about the knowability and regularity of nature. Sophie Hess examines the impacts of industrialization and natural resource extraction on people, animals, and ecosystems in colonial and early national Maryland. Labib Hossain explores two projects in Colonial Dacca - the Buckland Bund and Dacca Waterworks - that legitimised subsequent infrastructural interventions and facilitated a process of abstraction though which a particular idea of land and water was formed. Ultimately, this panel is part of the imaginative process for alternative to water management by which communities resist extractive processes to preserve their environmental futures.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Flood in Arid Lands: Imperial Durabilities in Algeria - Brock Cutler, Radford University

• A Hell of High Water: Counting the Dead in the Floodplains of Maryland's 1868 Storm - Sophie Hess, University of Maryland

• The Discourse of Contained Waters in Colonial Dacca: Buckland Bund and Dacca Water Works - Labib Hossain, Cornell University

Chair

• Preston Decker, Washburn Rural High School

Discussant

• Charlotte Leib, Yale University