Aqueous Instabilities

Dear Colleagues,

 Water’s instability was a determinant of colonial life for the French, Spanish, and American settlers in the Mississippi River Valley Basin. The Mississippi River flooded at irregular intervals and in unpredictable places;the first hurricane to hit French New Orleans in 1722 nearly wiped out the fledgling city. Even as the aspirational publicity tracts devised by the French Mississippi Company peddled Edenic myths of the stability and natural fertility of the land to potential immigrants, the experience of water’s excesses and fluidity instead structured the on-the-ground experiences of the Indigenous peoples, Black slaves, and colonial settlers of Louisiana.

The aim of this proposed Special Issue of Humanities is to explore the ways in which this experience is manifest in local cultural representations of water: in the literature, art, geography, music, and history of the delta community of the Mississippi River Valley —from the early modern period to the present. While some of these individual themes have received more attention in the last decade due to the disastrous flooding from Hurricane Katrina (2005), writing on these topics tends to isolate them or view them from a contemporary sociological or political perspective. Innovatively, this issue of Humanities will investigate the Mississippi River Valley Basin’s cultural productions as a whole, while taking into account the historical nature of the aqueous instability of this region.

The fundamentality of aqueousness to the identity of the Mississippi delta region is often powerfully manifested in the work of individuals whose historical and political voice has been silenced over time—or marginalized in the present. Examples of such works include the maps of upper Louisiana produced by a displaced Indigenous Miami tribesman in 1755, the outsider art of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), and the folk tales and traditions documented by oral historians and evident in creative work of local BAME authors. This Special Issue seeks not only to highlight these suppressed or under-recognized voices present in diverse media, but also to put them into a productive dialogue with one another and to engage with the historical evidence they offer.

The editors interpret ‘cultural production’ here in the broadest possible sense to engage scholars throughout the humanities investigating the ways in which fluidity and instability shape cultural productions in a delta environment—where land and water are always shifting places. Such aqueous territories are likely to become increasingly frequent global realities due to fluctuations of temperature and land use brought on by climate change; uncovering the past of one such region and putting it in dialogue with the present will shed light on the social, political, and cultural futures circumscribed by aqueous instabilities.

Please send an abstract of around 200 words,a short bio and a short CV by June 15, 2023 to: Camille Mathieu and Linda Chavers.

Dr. Camille Mathieu
Dr. Linda Chavers
Guest Editors

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• mississippi river valley basin
• art, history
• literature
• culture
• indigenous studies
• african-american studies
• colonialism in early america
• early modern
• contemporary