An Ecocritical Look at Flint’s Water Crisis and Afro-Gothic Liquidity

• In Event: Aesthetics and waterways

Description for Program

In 2014 Flint, Michigan switched its water supply from the treated Detroit system to the Flint River as a cost saving measure. The Flint River is the unofficial toxic waste disposal site for meatpacking plants, car factories, lumber, and paper mills, as well as the city’s depository of agricultural and urban runoff and untreated raw sewage. In what has since become known as the ‘Flint Water Crisis,’ studies revealed the foul-smelling water contained very dangerous levels of lead, fecal coliform bacteria, and toxic chemicals resulting in the third largest outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, skin rashes, hair loss, lifelong health issues, and even death. In what may be viewed as the gothic trope of ‘the poisoned well,’ the Flint Water Crisis has directly affected a mostly African American population where 45 percent of its residents are living below the poverty line. Originating as a wartime tactic to destroy enemy forces, the trope of the poisoned well narratively functions as an environmental toxicity that contaminates its residents turning them into walking monstrosities and a living plague.

In 2017, artist Pope L. created an artwork where he bottled the same noxious water shuttled to Flint residents and sold it to willing buyers. The proceeds were donated to organizations dedicated to alleviate the crisis. I consider the aesthetics and performativity of Pope L.’s Flint Water Project alongside discussions of Kathryn Yusoff’s work that recognizes the terror of the racialization of geology in addition to Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies that follows the materiality of monstrous genealogies in the face of geological traumatic encounters. Working with the trope of the poisoned well, Pope L.’s Flint Water Project, and the fantastical river goddess sculptures of Wangechi Mutu, I propose an ecocritical Afro-Gothic approach through an understanding of black geophysics as an embodiment of alluvial monstrosities.

Author

• Tashima Thomas, Southern Methodist University