Why keywords? 

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Water Politics in the Arid West

Inspired by Raymond Williams’ 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, this website presents a vocabulary of water politics in the arid West. Like Williams’ collection, this vocabulary is not a neutral review of meanings. Williams brought to light “a crucial area of social and cultural discussion,” a vocabulary that he intended to be critically subjected to “change and continuity.”[1] Likewise, I wish for my terms to be the subject of critical and ongoing conversation. However, in his description, Williams is less explicit about the ethical and political aim of his keywords than I would like to be here.

To be clear, the keywords I bring up are fodder for cultural transformations that are politically motivated toward a specific outcome: the decolonization of water in the arid American West. By decolonization, I mean shifting the cultural politics of water toward envisioning and establishing a more just environmental future, one that breaks the triad of settler-colonial relations and #waterback to Indigenous peoples. In what follows, I will explain dynamics of this shift from a cultural studies and settler colonial studies perspective on water politics. This collection aims for water decolonization in the arid American West by engaging in an impure hegemonic politics. By “hegemony” I mean as Stuart Hall writes, “the way in which political forces are able to win or mobilize popular support for historic tasks.”[2] These keywords engage settler colonial forces in terms of a hegemonic politics, or a “war of position,” the struggle that takes place in the “fronts” of civil society (culture, language, ideology, morality) related to water in the arid West. As Hall explains, victory doesn’t necessitate eliminating the enemy (settler colonialism). Instead, victory can take place by “seizing the balance of power” on each of these fronts.[3]

This keywords project breaks terms into “theoretical frames” and “everyday terms” to account for water politics as a site in which people “make history…on the basis of conditions which are not of their making.”[5] The “theoretical frames” bring to light “structures which cannot be visible to the naïve naked eye,”[6] while the “everyday terms” expose sites of contested meaning in which these structures might be critically and practically engaged. 

The “theoretical frames” entries draw heavily on settler colonial theories to explain what I think are conditions of possibility or tendential lines in the settler imagination. These concepts set the stage for our conversations. I hope my descriptions reveal constraints for water politics (for example, primitive accumulation) as well as offer opportunities to expand those conditions (for example, coalitions between rural, poor, and Indigenous self-sufficient producers). The “everyday terms” entries draw heavily on articulation theory to identify current and possible links (and delinks) in the settler imagination of water. By articulation, I mean, as Lawrence Grossberg writes, “the practice of linking together elements which have no necessary relation to each other.”[7] The terms, in other words, identify relationships in the field of water politics that are not necessary and are possible of being reconfigured. The terms I identify are thus unstable unities themselves; they are, as Jennifer Slack says, full of “correspondences, non-correspondences, contradictions, and fragments.”[8] One way I account for the instability of these terms is by identifying different “usages” of each term that currently shape or could shape water politics. In some instances, I suggest a new usage of a term altogether. I hope the reader will judge these new usages by whether or not they could feasibly be articulated in everyday contexts in the American West. 

Let me be clear that the “usages” I include are radically contextual uses of terms that, I think, are key sites where the hegemony of settler colonialism is negotiated—or could be negotiated. This vocabulary is not a dictionary, nor does it follow dominant etymological distinctions, nor is it an exhaustive list. It may not even be relevant outside a few arid states in the settler US. Rather, the usages I identify make up a radically contextual vocabulary that emerges from my experience with and theoretical reflection on contemporary water politics in the arid American West. In turn, I hope practitioners and fellow scholars help me challenge and refine my speculations. The benefit of this online platform is that I may consistently update the vocabulary to be more relevant. I also hope this collection grows, so that it can be more useful for decolonial actions on more cultural fronts. 

Finally, I wish to leave curious readers with a disclaimer that these keywords suggest moves in the war of position that are not romantic. They are impure and, I’m sure, full of contradictions. By waging an “impure war,” I am referring to what Grossberg describes as high stakes impure politics.[9] Grossberg explains that successful political uprisings can produce both solutions and more problems, more political work. I notice many environmental solutions resonate with the affective landscape Grossberg describes as “frenetic hyperactivism”[10]. In frenetic hyperactivism, no action is pure. So no action takes place. By contrast, the suggestions I put forth in my keywords project may attract scrutiny. But they are in the service of a long-term strategic aim. Take, for example, how to work with the settler colonial nation state. Many decolonial scholars explain that we need to do everything we can to avoid reinvesting in the settler nation state. If inclusion-based political projects just create more “settler-citizens,” decolonial water projects could be incommensurable. I take the aim of decolonization seriously as a long-term strategic goal. Yet, I take Grossberg’s insight that institutionalization, though impure, may be “a strategic and tactical, even empowering, necessity.”[11]

In turn, this vocabulary charts some impure tactics of working within the structures of the nation state in order to take steps toward a more decolonial water future. Kim Tallbear, for example, calls for Indigenous peoples to “colonize” and “settle” the sciences in order to bring Indigenous knowledge and ethics into this space of otherwise colonial knowledge production.[12] In the context of water politics, this vocabulary might ask: How could Indigenous peoples, thought, and theory “colonize” institutions of water politics? How can levers of power within the nation state work to stop the process of primitive accumulation with respect to water? Hopefully these Arid West Keywords offer some fodder for answering these types of questions.

[1] William’s wrote in his 1983 version of Keywords: "This is not a neutral review of meanings. It is an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once conscious and critical—subject to change as well as to continuity."

[2] Stuart Hall, “Lecture 7. Domination and Hegemony,” in Cultural Studies 1983, ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg (New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2020), 170, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373650-009.

[3] Hall, 178.

[4] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture & Society 2, no. 1 (1980 2016): 66, https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378000200106.

[5] Hall, 67.

[6] Hall, 67.

[7] Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, Book, Whole (New York: Routledge, 1992), 387.

[8] Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation In Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Book, Whole (London;New York; Routledge, 1996), 113.

[9] Grossberg, We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture.

[10] Lawrence Grossberg, Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

[11] Grossberg, We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, 388.

[12] Kimberly TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Book, Whole (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 204, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt46npt0.