Panel Chairs:
Begoña Simal González (Universidade da Coruña)
Carmen Flys Junquera (Universidad de Alcalá)
Water is not only necessary for the survival of the Earth as we know it, it is the very condition for life itself; indeed, water is the planetary blood needed for the Gaia organism to survive. The lack of water not only contributes to the desertification of the land, to the impoverishment of ecosystems and their biotic communities, but has also proved a seminal trope for the exploration of the spiritual "wasteland" resulting from the literal wasteland. If human greed is at the root of the unequal distribution and use of water resources, the depletion of the "Earth's blood" can also be read as revelatory of such avarice, institutionalized as rampant capitalism. Concomitantly, barren lands can also be said to signify upon human barrenness in literal and metaphorical terms. Likewise, floods can acquire a quasi-apocalyptical resonance and prove a severe reminder of human (ir)responsibility, as the New Orleans disaster proved.
To mention a few examples of literature concerned with "water-worlds" and "waste-lands", let us consider the many metaphorical meanings that accrue to the flood in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, where the protagonist tries to conjure away a persistent draught that he believed he had himself caused, or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which also exemplify the parallelism between physical and spiritual draught. Similarly, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms illustrates the devastation caused by human interference with natural water ways, while Rudolfo Anaya's last novel explores the multiple myths and metaphors of water, and Frank Herbert's classic Dune Chronicles traces the consequences of climate change for the desert planet Arrakis.
Suggested topics:
- Water as life, water as death
- Literal and spiritual wastelands
- Flooding and "waterworlds"
- Mythological readings of water and the water-cycle
- Water and the Gaia hypothesis
- Water and environmental racism
- Water as resource, water as power