(Post)humanizing Nonhuman Matter and the Politics of Water Crisis during the Capitalocene in Select Hydro-Dystopian Narratives

Abstract

Water crisis is a global emergency. The genre of eco-dystopian literature does the work of dramatically calling attention to all such water crises with narratives of the marginalised sections of societies who are affected the most by emerging water inadequacy or the poor quality of water provided to them. Capitalism weaponises  water during crises for the benefit of large corporations and governments by making available such resources to the richest sections of the society first. Ballard’s novel, The Burning World, engages in a possible posthumanization of water by plastic contamination, which leads to a rupture of the precipitation cycle, causing drought, while Bacigalupi’s novel, The Water Knife, narrates the phenomenon of monopolising water in a dystopian, drought-ridden America – an obvious future real-world outcome of the epoch of the Capitalocene. Anna Clark’s non-fiction work, The Poisoned City, is about Flint, Michigan’s poisoned water, which resulted from government negligence. These texts talk about environmental emergencies that could occur in any city or country across the globe during the Capitalocene. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to read Capitalocene’s slow violence and technological divide with an emphasis on how the contamination, unequal distribution, and weaponization of water affects marginalized communities and presages impending ecological doom. I argue the technologization and privatization of water by people in power has changed the ontological meaning of water –a process I refer to as the “posthumanization of water.” Therefore it calls for a review of capitalocentric disparity and colonization of our ecosystem in the name of progress – an idea conceived in the Global North – and to see how nonhuman agency such as water reacts with the human on the basis of how we treat it in the Capitalocene.