PhD | Re-imagining Water through Marginalized Stories in the Neerlandophone Space’ – Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder

PhD | Re-imagining Water through Marginalized Stories in the Neerlandophone Space’ – Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder
PhD Candidate: Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder
Institution: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
Supervisors: dr. Marrigje Paijmans, prof. dr. Gaston Franssen

This project explores the possibilities of re-imagining water through marginalized stories in the Neerlandophone space, that is, places where people have spoken Dutch or have been in contact with Dutch language and culture through colonialism. Taking an ecocritical, decolonial and neo-materialist approach, I engage with contemporary literature, performance and the arts in the Netherlands and in Indigenous cultures in the Neerlandophone space. This project aims to provide counter-stories to the age-old Dutch narrative of a ‘battle against the water’ in order to welcome water discursively and materially. I focus specifically on deltas and their marshes in the Netherlands, Brazil, Suriname and Indonesia as spaces where water meets land, and where seawater meets fluvial water. In this interface, deltas signify an in-between space where materials blur with each other, saturate each other and erode, thus challenging the distinction between land and water on which Dutch water management and Dutch colonialism depend.

This research ultimately seeks to imagine a more ‘amphibious’ way of living, where water as a material reality and a metaphorical concept can inspire new ways of learning to live with sea-level rise, fluvial and coastal flooding, drought, and climate crises.