What Is A River?

Do we know what a river is? Is a river necessarily part of nature? Do we know what nature is? Does a focus on nature necessarily occlude politics, or are we restricted to a mere politics of nature? Or, thinking with Benjamin, can we imagine a natural politics, as he does natural history? What does this time of crisis demand from our concepts of river, nature and politics? Join us for a conversation anchored in two recent books, Naveeda Khan’s River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke University Press, 2022) and Iftekhar Iqbal’s The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia (Stanford University Press, 2025). Reception to follow.

This event is in Levering Great Hall.

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Host or Publisher JHU Global South Humanities Initiative