Scalar Anglosphere: Wasteocene Waters and Vulnerable Bodies in Chioma Okereke’s Water Baby

The article addresses entangled scales and environmental enmeshment in the 21st-century Anglosphere, with a focus on the novel Water Baby (2014) by contemporary Nigerian writer Chioma Okereke, read through the methodological lens of new materialism (Neimanis, Armiero, DeLoughrey) and decolonial critique (Mbembe, Nixon, Newell). The analysis situates Makoko – a floating, unmapped and neglected settlement on the Lagos lagoon – as a site where the asymmetries of the contemporary Anglosphere and its crises become starkly visible. Scales and enmeshment are approached through representations of water and the poetics of water (Mentz, Oppermann), as both a constitutive of the human body and the bodies of nonhuman others, as well as the environment that is both agential and precarious. This methodology allows to examine the interplay of scales in the postcolony, manifesting itself in the temporalities of place, multiscalar inequalities and neocolonial infrastructures producing “wasted” lives and places, exposures and vulnerabilities. Through its immersive portrayal of watery materiality, Water Baby reveals how vulnerability is produced across temporal and spatial scales. Drawing on the example of this recent African novel, I show how foregrounding “wasted” bodies and places alongside forms of communal resilience, rendered through blue poetics and narrative hybridization, expand the representational horizons of contemporary Anglophone fiction.