The Blue Cultural Fix: Water-Spirits and World-Ecology in Jorge Amado’s <i>Mar Morto</i> and Pepetela’s <i>O Desejo de Kianda</i>

• Main Author: Thomas Waller
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Humanities
• Subjects: world literature; world-ecology; blue humanities; cultural fix; Jorge Amado; Pepetela
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/3/72

Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the ‘cultural fix’ and ‘fixed-labour-power’, this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado’s <i>Mar Morto</i> (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms over the poverty of the text’s working-class community of dockworkers with an ominous and mysterious edge. By contrast, the water-spirit in Pepetela’s novel <i>O Desejo de Kianda</i> (1995) is angry, active and only too immediate, seeking revenge for the extractivist violence carried out in the name of neoliberalism. Activating a broadly hydro-materialist framework, I argue that these differing conceptions of the water-spirit carry with them very different socio-ecological implications, and directly intersect with contemporary debates over hydrological crisis, the privatisation of the oceans and the enclosure of the water commons.