Brian Murray Walter

Managing water in the tidal city of Charleston, South Carolina entails tangling with a complex assemblage of historical infrastructure, uneven maintenance, and a rapidly changing ecology and climate. In this tidal metropolis—where 40% of enslaved people were trafficked into the United States—this task engages the afterlives of slavery, as they are embedded in landscapes and infrastructures. Tidal Power follows floodwaters and the efforts to contain them across racialized landscapes, during a moment of rapid sea-level rise and racial reckoning to question the relationships between heritage preservation, water infrastructure and the reproduction of white supremacy. Though city officials claim that “water knows no boundaries,” Black Charlestonians understand contemporary flooding to be routed through racialized infrastructure protecting white neighborhoods valued as sites of “collective heritage” and leaving Black communities at risk. Long-preserved antebellum mansions and rice plantations are protected by hard barriers and dike systems; urban and rural low-lying Black communities are flooded out by new development and inadequate drainage maintenance. In the face of rising seas and perilous flooding, how are historical racial hydrologies and the water infrastructures undergirding them entrenched or reorganized?