Historical and political violence has increasingly been examined through the lens of memory and environmental degradation, where the material presence of rivers, lakes, and shorelines above ground, as well as other subterranean water forms, bears the sedimented traces of trauma and ecological harm. In Las aguas bajan turbias (Dark River, 1952), set in the yerba mate plantations of the Alto Paraná, the river becomes a symbol and, perhaps, the film’s main protagonist. Used in the processing of yerba mate, its turbid waters carry the bodies of exploited workers—mensúes—discarded and left to drift downstream, as discarded evidence of social and ecological devastation. The Paraná becomes both a conduit for capitalist extraction and a vessel bearing the dead.

This image of the river as witness and bearer of violence finds resonance in multiple contemporary artistic and literary productions. Claudia Aboaf’s El rey del agua, Fernanda Trías’s Mugre rosa, and Nona Fernández’s Mapocho each explore how water functions as both a material force and a symbolic archive of ecological and political violence. In El rey del agua, Aboaf imagines a speculative future in the Buenos Aires Delta where water is rationed, commodified, and controlled by a populist strongman. Trías’s Mugre rosa unfolds in a port city overtaken by a toxic epidemic and environmental decay, where pink spores infect the air and fish rot in the harbor. In Mapocho, Fernández reimagines Santiago’s central river as a spectral repository of Chile’s erased histories—from colonial violence to the dictatorship’s disappearances. Taken together, these novels position aquatic landscapes as haunted and contested terrains, where the residues of extractivism, state violence, and trauma converge, compelling us to read water as a witness, a grave, and a site of narrative resistance.

Ecologies of Grief seeks proposals that examine aquatic imaginaries in Latin America and other global contexts where extractivism and historical trauma converge. This seminar aims to explore how bodies of water function as both necro-spaces and sites of memory in literature, film, visual arts, and performance. We invite proposals that investigate how water becomes a locus for articulating trauma and ecological grief. We invite proposals that investigate how water becomes a locus for articulating trauma and ecological grief. Waters, in this framework, are understood as dynamic archives and material sites that transform cultural memory across time and geography. 

We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics: 

• Material residues of trauma in aquatic landscapes
• Water as a necro-space
• Artistic and activist interventions in water-based ecologies
• Narratives that intertwine extractivism, ecological crisis, and ecological trauma
• Indigenous and Afro-descendant cosmologies of water and memory
• Water as an agent of resistance and spiritual continuity.