Drowned Places: Sea-Level Rise and Narrative Crisis in Elizabeth Rush's Rising

Abstract

Anthropogenic sea-level rise is forcing—and will force—extraordinary measures in adaptation and retreat. At the same time, it is compelling conventions in aesthetics, geography, and narrative to contend with fundamental challenges to description, reference, perception, and place. This article examines Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018), an ambitious and sensitive account of the impacts of sea-level rise on coastal communities in the United States. Among Rising's proliferating seascapes, inundation tends to entail a fundamental loss of place, and open waters tend to prove inhospitable to history and memory. The article situates these tendencies among theories of aqueous and marine location, systems of narrative reference, and settler-colonial traditions in spatiality. I read Rising as a statement, poignant and perturbing, of anthropogenic sea-level rise as a creeping catastrophe for certain conventions in interpretation, imagination, and representation—and an impetus to recognize and amplify alternate ontologies. My wider purpose is threefold: to furnish one method for accessing and interpreting the literatures of sea-level rise; to identify the imaginative constraints impinging on certain liquid imaginaries; and to gesture toward the presence and promise of other visions. I aim, ultimately, to help demonstrate the poetic polysemy that incoming waters can be heard, and read, to supply—and to make place for the voices of those who are helping situate their, and "our," watery futures.