Reading the Mega-Dam for the Flows of Globalization

In an age of global “flows” and historical blockages, amidst a crisis of financial “liquidity” and a general rhetoric of “fluid” identities, political communities and ideologies, the hydro-electric mega-dam looms as both an icon and a technology of global power relations that is rich with metaphoric and material significance. On the one hand, the mega-dam promises modern and modernist em-power-ment, electrification, and the subordination of something called nature to something called nation. On the other hand, the mega-dam’s shadow is a legacy of exploitation and destruction around the world: one fundamental to the production and reproduction of the contemporary neocolonial world system and one which has flooded specific peoples and places with a profound and toxic debt that is not merely financial, but also ecological, social and cultural.

In order to unpack this dense site of global struggle, Haiven’s paper advances in three parts. In the first part, he suggests that the climactic scenes of dams breaking in recent Hollywood blockbusters reveal both a profound ambivalence and desire in the Western political unconscious. He reads these recurring scenes of fantastic structural collapse as a vexed neo-diluvian longing for the return of repressed and oppressed flows of water—an apocalyptic counterpoint to modernity and globalization within privileged quarters of the global order (for instance, see Lord of the Rings: Two Towers [2002], X2: X-Men United [2003] and Transformers [2007]). In the second section, Haiven traces the intertwined political, economic and cultural forces of global support and resistance to hydroelectric mega-dams in the work of internationally acclaimed Indian novelist, essayist, and anti-dam activist, Arundhati Roy. In conclusion, Haiven addresses Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1999), a novel set in the shadow of a dam built illegally on Blackfoot lands in Southern Alberta. Here, the tropes of water and fluidity act as playful multivalent foils to the cultural, social, and historical blockages of ongoing colonialism. Within the breach and collapse of these exemplary dams, Haiven navigates the potential for a globalization from below.