Session: 3b
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair: Katharina Fackler
Panel Description: This panel traces how thinking, feeling, and being with water has spawned resistant, multispecies forms of being-in-common since the 19th century. Water, Astrida Neimanis has pointed out, dissolves modern myths of discrete individualism and self-determined humanness. As “a watery body sloshes and leaks, excretes and perspires,” it creates “other assemblages” (Bodies of Water 46) that transcend boundaries of species, race, and gender. What assemblages and forms of dwelling, mobility, and being with water enable resistance? What relations and intimacies are necessary in order to resist and to coexist? Combining theories from the Blue Humanities with Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Queer Theory, our four papers trace aquatic assemblages of resistance to slavery, settler colonialism, and straight ecologies that eschew binaries between the human and the non-human. The respective contributions will consider a variety of texts (autobiography, poetry, play) from different centuries to bring into conversation the continuities and changes that resistance and coexistence in aquatic environments require.
Katharina Fackler (University of Bonn), “Making Kin, Mapping Abundance: Multispecies Relations in Contemporary Hawaiian Poetry”
Abstract: This presentation contemplates how resistant formations of multispecies kinship are registered, enacted, and rendered (il-)legible in contemporary (Indigenous) Hawaiian poetry. In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future (2021), Candace Fujikane argues that “the demise of capital” will “make[…] way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms” (3). These familial relations are based on practices of care, belonging, and reciprocity that far exceed colonial notions of the human, settler temporalities, and settler liberalism’s “geontopower” (Povinelli 2016). They emerge from traditional stories and storied practices that center sustained considerations of “elemental forms,” including hydrological cycles that link land and sea, as well as all forms of beings. Kanaka‘Ōiwi/Native Hawaiian poets such as Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Brandy Nālani McDougall, D. Kealiʻi Mackenzie, and No’u Revilla draw on and adapt such traditional stories. While their styles and poetic voices differ, they all evoke watery forms of connection and affection that interlink human and more-than-human beings across generations. Combining English with Native Hawaiian linguistic and literary traditions, they raise crucial questions about audiences, subject positions, and the (il-)legibility of Indigenous social formations in different contexts. Engaging notions of a “settler aloha ‘āina” (Fujikane 2021) and “insurgent Indigeneity” (Ikaika Ramones 2024), this presentation will also ponder how readers emplaced in non-Hawaiian contexts and knowledge systems may (and may not) enter into relation with and through the aquatic currents of Hawaiian poetry.
Bio: Katharina Fackler is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn. She is the author of Picturing the Poor: Photography and the Politics of Poverty (forthcoming Penn State UP 2026) and co-editor, with Silvia Schultermandl, of the special issue Kinship as Critical Idiom in Oceanic Studies (Atlantic Studies 2023). Together with Nathalie Aghoro, she leads a DFG-funded research group on “The Cultural Politics of Reconciliation.”
Paula von Gleich (University of Bremen), “Fugitive Currents: Rethinking Water as a Site of Captivity and Flight in Early Black Autobiography”
Abstract: While ecocritical scholarship on nineteenth-century African American literature has often focused on land-based geographies of slavery and resistance, this paper foregrounds bodies of water as key sites. Focusing on pre-bellum autobiographies of formerly enslaved abolitionist writers, such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, and Frederick Douglass, the paper challenges the terracentric and anthropocentric paradigms of much critical theory as it rethinks the relation of water, fugitivity, and the history of slavery in this Black abolitionist writing tradition. By drawing on Black Atlantic theory and Black feminist thought (Gilroy, Gumbs, Hartman, Sharpe, Tinsley) as well as the blue humanities(Mentz, Oppermann), this paper examines water and terraqueous environments not only as a conduit of the death, loss, and violence of the Middle Passage. It also studies them as sites of resistance against structures of antiblack oppression. At these sites, death is not only imagined as a form of escape. Death and flight as well as other forms of dwelling in water and movement through, within, and across water also become imaginative practices of fugitive freedom. By placing autobiographical narratives in dialogue with contemporary critical theory at the intersection of Black Studies and blue humanities, or what Jonathan Howard pointedly describes as the “Black and Blue Humanities,” the paper positions rivers and lakes as well as the liminal spaces in-between water and dry land, such as swamps and tidal/coastal areas as both key physical and historical as well as cultural and conceptual sites of fugitivity and freedom seeking.
Bio: Paula von Gleich is lecturer with senior track at the department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bremen, where she teaches and researches English-Speaking cultures and the blue humanities with a focus on North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic. She is founding member of the Bremen Blue Humanities Research Group. Her monograph The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature analyzes concepts of fugitivity and captivity in Black North American and Black Atlantic narratives and Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory.
Anna-Lena Oldehus (University of Freiburg), “Coexisting in Marshlands: Proximity and Relationality in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s and Pauline Johnson’s (Tekahionwake) Writing”
Abstract: This paper will respond to the conference’ interest in forms and representations of coexistence. By close reading the poem “Marshlands” written by Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) in the late 19th century and by bringing my discussion into conversation with Leanne Simpson’s recent work Theory of Water (2025) and her elaboration of shorelands, I will explore notions of distance and proximity that appear to be necessary for consensual forms of coexistence in these liminal spaces between land and water. Simpson states that shorelines “where land and water meet, where birds, fish and mammals meet, are zones of overlapping worlds, often teeming with diversity and mino-bimaadiziwin” (85-86).
What kinds of attentiveness, proximity, and relationality does Simpson observe and describe in her engagement with nonhuman creatures along the shorelines of the Great Lakes? How is this engagement reflected in Pauline Johnson’s poetic form and imagery? And what role do nonhuman beings play in the vital environmental spaces of the marshland and shoreline of the Great Lakes, from which both Johnson and Simpson write across different centuries? Departing from the poetic and essayistic texts of these two First Nations writers, this presentation will address these questions in order to explore different forms of coexistence that the Great Lakes shoreline makes possible.
Bio: Anna-Lena Oldehus is a postdoctoral researcher in the English Department at the University of Freiburg and a member of the Young Academy for Cultures and Societies Research at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). She has completed her doctoral studies at the University of Hannover in 2024. In her current research project “Floating, Drifting, Enduring – Writing with the Great Lakes in the Long 19th Century,” she builds on her research interest in the Blue Humanities, Environmental Humanities, 19th-century literature, and Indigenous Studies.
Linda Hess (University of Augsburg), “Voracious Matter: Watery Intimacies in Shonni Enelow’s Carla and Lewis (2014) and Genevieve Simon’s Bloom Bloom Pow (2022)”
Abstract: This paper will focus on two climate-change plays: Shonni Enelow’s Carla and Lewis (2011) and Genevieve Simon’s Bloom Bloom Pow (2022). Considering these two plays jointly is particularly productive, since they not only decenter their human characters, but moreover use watery intimacies – encounters with lakes, algea, mud – to emphasize humanity’s indissoluble bonds with non-human matter. At a time when, as Browyn Bailey-Chateris states, “with the acceleration of the climate crisis, water has […] become a central material and metaphor for the times” (1), both plays tackle the representational difficulties of the climate crisis by pursuing modes that, “rather than use research to make theatre,“ use theatre “to do research” (Chaudhuri 1) in terms of water-related crises. Enelow and Simon present human and non-human matter not only as equally “vibrant,” to say it with Jane Bennett, but also as intimately entangled. Non-human agents and characters in each of the plays (mud, algae, punk butterflies, a dead horse…) challenge human characters and audiences alike to recognize their own intimate relations with what they most want safely out of sight: sewage, waste, and toxicity. Intimacy here resists notions of romance and safety: it is “prying, needling, and uncanny” (Hoglund 63).
I will use lenses of queer ecology and new materialism to examine how both plays express these uncomfortable intimacies via themes of voraciousness and porosity, and how they serve not only to challenge notions of human primacy but also to acknowledge difference while resisting ideas of separateness. Lastly, I consider how both plays leave their audiences with transformations that can be read as productive means to re-consider, not only the categorical boundaries between human and non-human, but also the “world-without-us” trope, proposing that humans “won’t cease to exist“ but they will “just take a different form” (Simon 80).
Bio: Linda Hess is a senior lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She is author of Queer Aging in North American Fiction (2019) and co-editor of Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (2021). Her current research project on “Comic Modes in Environmental Narratives: Humor as a Lens for Climate Catastrophe, Environmental Justice, and Human Follies” is situated at the intersection of the environmental humanities and humor studies.