`A Body of Water Inside Me?: Insurgent Waterscapes Shaping African American Life and Literature from the Great Migration into the Twenty-First Century, 1919-2019

‘A Body of Water Inside Me’: Insurgent Waterscapes Shaping African American Life and Literature from the Great Migration to the Present” studies literary and historical relationships between Black subjects and bodies of water beyond yet not divorced from the Atlantic Ocean and its symbolic and material legacies of Middle Passage. Assembling an eclectic archive of poetry, a novel, photojournalism, documentary photography, and African American periodicals, I index various relatively natural bodies of freshwater and human-constructed swimming pools as what I call insurgent waterscapes. I argue that studying these bodies of water in the literary and historical contexts of the Great Migration illuminates their significance to Black personal and political worldmaking amidst white supremacist violence into our contemporary moment. These waterscapes include: the Lake Michigan of 1919 Chicago in Eve L. Ewing’s poetry collection 1919 and Lishan AZ’s Eugene’s Cove; the freshwater lakes, Floridan aquifer, and storm systems of 1928 central and southern Florida in Zora Neale Hurston’s watershed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; urban swimming pools in 1920s to 1930s Philadelphia, Harlem and a hotel pool in 1960s St. Augustine, and twenty-first century outdoor pools in McKinney, Texas and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I employ two interrelated research methods through which to explore these materials. Using feminist autotheory, I use my personal experience as a competitive swimmer, lifeguard, and swim instructor to position myself as a guide through the roughly one-hundred year timeline that my archive spans. Feminist autotheory allows me to critically examine my own attachments to the forms of water I study, and unsettle a linear progress narrative of African American sociopolitical life from chattel slavery to our contemporary moment. Further, I develop a method called limnological reading, which uses the physical, chemical, and biological elements of freshwater ecosystems to inform my analyses of African American literature. Using ecological reports and freshwater science, limnological reading offers a way to make visible the underconsidered forms of freshwater in these literary works, as well as their impact on the interior lives of Black literary subjects. This dissertation intervenes upon ongoing critical conversations in the fields of Black geographies, Black feminist criticism, and Ecocriticism. First, I contend that the study of these waters illuminates the significance of aquatic recreation—particularly in the forms of swimming and fishing—to African American life throughout the twentieth century and into the present moment. Second, I contend that the study of these forms of freshwater and swimming pools demonstrate that struggles against white supremacy are not contained to terrestrial movements such as marches or sit-ins; indeed, these waters serve as insurgent, rebellious sites of political struggle. Third, I contend that these waters, though differing in material composition from the Atlantic Ocean, are also significant and complex sites of freedom and constraint.