The Afterlives of Waterways: Changing Sites of Violence, Resistance, and Histories across the African Diaspora

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel explores water as a dynamic medium of memory and resistance across the African Diaspora, attending to its duality as both a site of violence and resilience. Building on Christina Sharpe’s (2016) theorization of “residence time,” we consider how water’s cyclical nature and capacity to hold memory challenge temporal boundaries. Residence time—the period a substance remains in a system—becomes a conceptual tool to understand how histories of Black dispossession and resistance are suspended in the present, always returning, always now. This perspective enables an analytical engagement with water’s materiality and metaphorical resonance to disrupt linear representations of time and reveal the layered experiences of Black life in the wake. Through memory work, water emerges as a counterpoint to erasure, asserting Black presence and futures in spaces shaped by dispossession.

Our papers draw upon interdisciplinary methods from Black Studies and Black Geographies to highlight the diasporic significance of water for ongoing histories of racialized violence, collective memory and reclamation: One paper examines Black landowners in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where heirs’ property embodies the precarious entanglement of ancestral ties and modern dispossession. A second discussion of Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp considers the embodied insurgent actions of Black women within the context of chattel slavery and social death. A third produces a poetic discourse of the Nile as a site of resistance and repression in the contemporary Sudanese freedom struggle. A fourth discusses the Colombian Caribbean, where mangrove ecosystems connect historical displacement with contemporary struggles for Black ecological and cultural sovereignty. By tracing the fluid interplay between water, memory, and insurgent Black ecologies, the panel illuminates how various communities from the US South, to Latin America, to the African Continent navigate the cyclical tides of violence and reclamation to forge enduring connections between past, present, and future.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Jameelah Morris, Western University

Individual Presentations

• A Right to Legacy: Heirs Property, Memory, and Resistance in Coastal South Carolina - Kristin McFadden, Stanford University

• Black Women and Insurgent Ecology: Woods, Water, and Gendered Rebellion in the Great Dismal Swamp - Kathryn Benjamin Golden, University of Delaware

• Elegy for Sudan’s Martyrs: Toward a Poetic Discourse of the Nile as a Site of Resistance and Repression - Umniya Najaer, University of Colorado Boulder

• Mangroves of Memory: Black Aquatic Archives of Refuge and Futurity in the Colombian Caribbean - Jameelah Morris, Western University