In Hydrofictions, Hannah Boast identifies water as a crucial new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine.
On Monday, October 26, 2020, at 16:00, Hannah Boast, Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, presented Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series.
Water is a major global issue that will shape our future. This book identifies water as a crucial new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It covers a broad range of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian authors including Mourid Barghouti, Sayed Kashua and Amos Oz. It argues for the necessity of recognising water’s vital importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, showing that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. In doing so, it offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it.