Ecofeminist drought and slow ecological grief in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed

Cahillane, Ashley. (2024). Ecofeminist Drought and Slow Ecological Grief in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed. Green Letters, 28(4), 341-354. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2024.2441254

Abstract

This article analyses temporalities of drought and grief in an understudied millennial Australian novel: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed. Watershed depicts a young white farming couple in rural Victoria battling a fierce drought while coping with prolonged grief over the death of their ten-year-old son. I contend that the layering of drought and grief in the text – both figured as slow forms of crisis – proffer slow temporalities that deal with both the small and large scales of space and time which constitute anthropogenic climate change. Using hydrocritical, postcolonial, and ecofeminist approaches, I show how the text articulates a politicised multiscalar yet embodied perspective which demonstrates the insights that a specifically freshwater approach to the blue humanities can bring to theorisations of environmental time and narrative strategy during planetary crisis.

Publisher

Taylor and Francis Group and Routledge

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND

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Collections

English (Scholarly Articles)