ABSTRACT
This essay examines world-literary representations of neoliberal hydroculture, exploring the crisis of “cheap water.” I investigate how water functions in hydrofiction as a thematic element, but also as representation and symbolic regime, product and producer of the socio-ecological relations stabilizing the neoliberal organization of water. I begin with an analysis of Latin American and Chinese hydrofictions which anticipate intensified enclosure of water commons at the moment of the neoliberal turn before moving to the analysis of twenty-first-century novels that register China’s turn to “extreme water.” These hydrofictions display similar tendencies towards “hydro-irrealism” that underscore the limits of the hydrological regime. I conclude with two examples of millennial “hydro cli-fi” that portray “water shock” in autumnal cores. The impulse of these Euro-American cli-fis is diagnostic, but also regulatory, projecting fears of a new hydrological revolution as the basis for Chinese ascendancy.
