Rivering Towards: Desert-Water Poetics and Politics was a space for collecting meanings of water and the act(s) of rivering, tying together the multiplicities of life, movement, geographies, gender, apocalypse, and material decolonization. Facilitated by Mallika Singh, participants read and webbed together poets and writers including Natalie Diaz, Asiya Wadud, Nick Estes, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, mónica teresa ortiz, and Brandon Shimoda.
Books and Articles
Tracey Baptiste, “Mermaids Have Always Been Black," New York Times, June 10, 2019.
adrienne maree brown, “the river,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place, & Community 13 (Spring 2019).
Dipesh Charkrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Inger Christensen, alphabet, trans. Susana Nied (New York: New Directions, 2001).
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
Angel Dominguez, ROSESUNWATER (New York: Operating System, 2020).
Rachel Harkness, ed., An Unfinished Compendium of Materials (Aberdeen, Scotland: University of Aberdeen, 2017).
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).
Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, “On Oceanic Fugitivity," Items, September 29, 2020.
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 16-28.
Di Minardi, "A river used to run through it: how New Mexico handles a dwindling Rio Grande," The Guardian, January 12, 2021.
Molly Montgomery, "The Future of Acequias: 'The Veins of Our Community'," Rio Grande Sun, September 28, 2019.
New Mexico Acequia Association, El Agua Es Vida – Suggested Reading on New Mexico’s Acequias, April 3, 2020.
Lorine Niedecker, Lake Superior (Seattle: Wave Books, 2013).
Marcela Olivera, "Water Beyond the State," Patterns of Commoning, n.d.
NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
Maria Popova, “Brokenness as Belonging: “lake-loop” by Mojave American Poet Natalie Diaz, in a Stunning Animated Short Film by Artist Ohara Hale,” The Marginalian, 2020.
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability," in Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, eds. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças, with Isabella Rjeille (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57-65.
Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber & Faber, 2010).
Amia Srinivasan, “The Sucker, the Sucker!,” London Review of Books 39, no. 17 (September 7, 2017).
Poems by Kai Minosh Pyle, Anmly, n.d.
Ariana Reines, A Sand Book (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2020).
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Christina Sharpe, “The Weather,” The New Inquiry, January 19, 2017.
Rivers Solomon, The Deep (New York: Saga Press, 2019).
Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Video, Audio, Visual Art
Laura Aguilar (artist).
BBC Earth, Discovering Underwater Lake Ecosystems (2018).
Carolina Caycedo, Land of Friends, Descolonizando La Jagua, 2014. HD video, sound and color, 38:10 min.
Kenton Card, dir., Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Antipode Foundation, 2020).
Lorna Goodison, “Deep Sea Diving,” reading hosted by Kamau Brathwaite, Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, University of Miami, English Department, 1992, 39:00 min.
Cannupa Hanksa Luger, We Live (Future Ancestral Technologies, 2019).
Nico Vela Page, Rivering Towards playlist, 2021.*
Nohemi Perez (artist).
Alice Oswald, "Interview with Water," lecture, TORCH: Professor of Poetry Lecture, Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, June 25, 2020.
Mallika Singh, RIVERING playlist, 2020.
Anicka Yi on nonhuman ecologies and embodied machines, conversation with Elvia Wilk, e-flux podcast, 2020.
*Note from Nico: "Despite the obviousness/literalness of most of the track choices lol, they were all intentional and the ordering is sort of meant to flow from desert spring to river to the sea."
Bodies of Water
Mississippi River Meander Belt
Other
Bathsheba Demuth, "Do Whales Judge Us? Interspecies History and Ethics," lecture, Dal's College of Sustainability, Halifax, Canada, 2020.
S*an D. Henry-Smith and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, "What Could I Have Said With a Mouthful of Salt," Triple Canopy, July 11, 2019.
Isabelle Saldana, By Water, By Land: Reading Packet.
Mallika Singh, waterways, are.na channel.
Brandon Shimoda, “from an ongoing transcript of what my daughter says on our walks,” Twitter thread, 2020.
