21 Oct (De-)colonial Blues
Waterborne Method and the Inter-discipline’s Resource Frontiers
Day: Wednesday 29 October 2025
Time: 4–5:30pm AEST
Where: Online, please register here: https://jcu.zoom.us/meeting/register/PcabwaeRReew3cQnmUms8w
In the past decade, the Blue Humanities has enjoyed a theoretical purchase on an increasingly expansive geographical range, including a shift from the Anglo-American centre to the Pacific. This move presupposes a cartographic orientation towards waterscapes, whose frontline is precisely resisting the language and the logic of such globalist tendencies. The assumption here is that while water is an instrumental part of the colonial project, it can also be rethought in the decolonial register, as an element that not only enables imperial imaginative and material domination but contains properties to resist and re-envision less destructive futurities. In this lecture, I will talk about the ways that Australian literature, in particular First Nation literature, can trouble water as a theoretical device in literary humanities by reverting it to its function as colonial resource frontier. By drawing on texts from early settlers to Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, I will argue that the Blue Humanities cannot be safely extricated from water-colonialist arrangements and the ongoing and historical Indigenous water injustices, and that waterborne method first needs to confront the coloniality of inter-disciplinary imaginaries.
About the presenter
Keyvan Allahyari (PhD Melbourne, 2019) is Junior Professor in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Jena. Previously, he held Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oslo, Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Tübingen, Fryer Library Fellowship at the University of Queensland, and Emerging Critics Fellowship at Sydney Review of Books. He is the author of Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist (Palgrave, 2023), and the forthcoming Liquid Objects: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Material Ecologies of Water (Routledge). He writes about borders and waters.
Proudly supported by the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing.