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Our conference addresses water infrastructure as what the scholar Bonnie Honig has
called a “public thing,” as a matter of political struggle in multiple manners, modes,
and media across the various political landscapes of the Americas. Water infrastructure
engages vital questions of management, conservation, and access rights and entitlements.
How, we ask, are water infrastructures contested in politics and represented in culture?
Our panelists address these questions from many angles: dam construction and its consequences; riparian rights; drinking
water contamination; sea-level rise and global warming; literary representations of
water, and more
This event is made possible by support from the Faculty in the Arts, Humanities and
lettered Social Sciences (FAHSS) Fund, the English Department, the Hispanic Languages
and Literature Department, the Latin American and Caribbean Center, and HISB.
To download a pdf of the event poster, click here.
Event Schedule
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 14
1:30 pm Welcome, Refreshments and Introduction
SESSION 1: 2:30 pm – 3:50 pm
Sarah Jo Townsend, Penn State University
“Opera and Infrastructure on the Amazon River”
| Opera is often imagined as the epitome of excess and superfluity, particularly in
Latin America where it is viewed as a European art with few connections to local realities.
Yet the elegant opera houses erected in many of Brazil’s principal cities during the
export boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were major construction
projects. Building an opera house involved importing vast quantities of manufactured
furnishings and European artists while also tapping into—and often establishing—more
local sources of manual and handicraft labor. Contributing to this was opera’s status
as a “total” art that integrated instrumental music, singing, dance, and complex stage
machinery, which often incorporated new technological advances. |
| This presentation focuses on the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house inaugurated in Manaus
at the height of the Amazonian rubber boom. For nearly two decades after its inauguration
in 1896, this opulent edifice drew opera and theater companies from Europe (and less
often the US and Japan) nearly one thousand miles up the Amazon River—a massive movement
of people and things that contributed to integrating this waterway into international
circuits of commodities and exchange. Drawing on recent theoretical work on infrastructure
and urbanization, I focus on the construction of the Teatro Amazonas and its subsequent
performance history to show how the theater helped mobilize new networks of labor,
transportation, and finance. In doing so, the presentation suggests that the Teatro
Amazonas can contribute to a more far-reaching reconceptualization of the role of
culture as a catalyst of infrastructural expansion. |
Johnny Lorenz, Montclair State University
“Nothing Was Happening: Infrastructure in the Work of Clarice Lispector”
| This talk will give special attention to Lispector's The Besieged City (1948), a Brazilian
novel I translated. Chapter 6 offers rhetorical clues that something significant
is about to occur ("What happened that afternoon..."); a few pages into this short
chapter, the narrative voice asserts: "nothing was happening though." What we find
in this chapter is our protagonist, Lucrécia, doing the dishes and vacantly scanning
the city's landscape, spying on deserted streets and exposed pipes. Nothing happens,
and yet something (or "some thing") must be happening. This paradox is familiar to
readers of Lispector's work: a scene that depicts the tedium of modernity but is almost
unbearably intense. Lucrécia is working like a "small gear" within "the larger one,"
and she "no longer knew who was washing and what was being washed." Lispector's novel
provides a provocative representation of an individual's interaction with urban infrastructure
(in this case, waterworks) because something, something very powerful, in fact, is
happening: water is traveling enormous distances to reach a young woman's sink. Is
it her not-thinking about running water that allows her to commune more fully in the
elaborate system of the city's waterworks? This chapter is an experiment in story-telling,
for how does one fashion a story out of the banal, modern experience of turning on
the tap? Lispector's representation of infrastructure works within her larger project
of writing beyond personal feeling and subjective meaning; Lucrécia's dream is to
become an object of the city. |
SESSION 2: 4:00 pm – 5:20 pm
Charlotte Rogers, University of Virginia
“Crumbling Coasts: Infrastructure, Art, and Environment in Contemporary Puerto Rico”
Nicolas Mirzoeff, New York University
“Below the Water: Hierarchies of Life and Revolutionary Time.”
| For the Indigenous gathered at Standing Rock to say “water is life” is old and sacred
knowledge. It was put to new ends as they became water protectors, together with non-Indigenous
supporters. The North Dakota State Police armed with sticks revived the oldest figure
of settler colonialism in defense of its prime directive: “conquer nature, occupy
land.” Under racial capitalism, “water is life” has become a revolutionary statement,
a different perspective on what life actually is, not measured as a span but as a
set of relations. It upends the hierarchy of life by which those designated as white
are given the capacity to order and govern all other life by right of conquest. It
measures time cosmologically with the (dangerous) supplement of revolutionary time.
From below the water, there is a different perspective. The designation of the recent
past as the Anthropocene seems to have exhausted one phase of activism that has reconfigured
around the hard time limit of extinction. Extinction was always part of racial capital’s
hierarchy of life. Migrant labor luxury hotel capitalism thinks no further forward
than 25 years. What does it now mean to take the time to think about what it is to
say “water is life,” whether from the water-borne forced migrations of the 20th and
21st centuries? |
Discussions
Reception
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 15
9:30 am Coffee
SESSION 3: 10:00 am – 11:20 am
Mark Healey,University of Connecticut
“Undercurrents of Power: Groundwater, Development, and Ecological Collapse in the
Argentine Wine Belt, 1950-1990.”
| This paper examines the relationship between water, politics, and technology in western
Argentina from 1960 to 1990, exploring how a modernization project driven by local
winegrowers and powerfully shaped by the state first expanded and then unraveled a
century-old model of irrigated agriculture. |
| Since the 1880s, the backbone of growth in the arid lands of western Argentina was
an expanding irrigation system fed by snowmelt from the Andes. Drawing water by an
increasingly dense network of canals, landowners planted nearly 300,000 hectares of
vineyards, making the region of Cuyo into the wine powerhouse of Latin America. But
by 1960, nearly all surface water had been appropriated and the costs of regional
dependence on wine were becoming clear. |
| Healey explores how an attempted techno-political fix for these problems led to early
success, then deepening crisis, and finally an unravelling of the regional development
model itself. This account focuses on three moments. First, inexpensive new pumps
and government credits aiming to promote alternatives to grape-growing produced the
rapid spread of thousands of wells on newly irrigated lands. But this expansion took
place just as the region suffered one of the deepest droughts on record (1968), leading
to an overuse of underground water. Soon enough, the wells undermined maintenance
on the canal system while encouraging an expansion of familiar production rather than
novel crops, producing a crisis of grape overproduction. Second, broader state efforts
to measure and govern irrigation were implemented just as the grape market was peaking
and water supplies were crashing, turning optimistic developmental initiatives into
scattered and desperate attempts at rescue. Third, during the 1980s, as regional agricultural
prices crashed, annual waterflows peaked, yielding overabundant water, a brief burst
of overproduction, and then the final collapse of large areas of productive land due
to salinization. Throughout the three moments, the failure to maintain infrastructure
or to fully consider how to maintain productive land and water sources undermined
the state’s long-term hydraulic mission and the regional agro-industrial model. |
Karina Yager, Stony Brook University
“Who's watching the water tower? Shifting hydroscapes in the Andes.”
SESSION 4: 11:30 am – 12:50 pm
Betsy Damon, Artist
“Infrastructure for Living Waters”
| Since life itself is impossible without water, I propose certain maxims about humankind’s
relationship to water. Chief among these is that water must be the foundation of planning
and design. I spell out the practical implementations of centering society around
water, invoking previous projects such as the Living Water Garden in Chengdu, China,
as well the Living Waters of Larimer, a project in Pittsburgh that demonstrates how
green infrastructure can be artfully integrated into the urban spaces. |
Michael Rubenstein, Stony Brook University
“‘Nothing Beyond Itself’: The End of Infrastructure”
Discussions
Closing remarks
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