Wetland: exploring depth on a river island

Keywords: Wetland, landscape, river, island, border, state
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

It is April 13, 2015, and in a teardrop of marshland called Gornja Siga on the western bank of the middle Danube, a group of libertarians are about to plant a flag. With this symbolic act, they claim a riverine territory disputed since 1947 and disclaimed by the riparian states following the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992. The act of planting a flag suggests Gornja Siga is dry land, and it is distinct from the waters that bound it. Gornja Siga lies beyond the winding cadastral border – which Croatia asserts – and the main channel of the Danube – which Serbia asserts. As territory it is fundamentally permeable, consisting of Holocene alluvial sediments that formed fluvisols and gleysols in riverine paleochannels, a legacy of repeated flooding visible in a complex terrain of meander scars and oxbow lakes made legible as land and water in the nineteenth century through levees, drainage, and transportation canals. It lies barely above the Danube in a floodplain. An uncertain bank, demi-island, and restless river lap against surficial static ontologies typically associated with land, in a river valley set between the ambiguous horizontal boundaries of states and the indefinite vertical boundaries of water, land, and sky. Gazing across waters that rise and spill so often on this Danubian plain, we explore depth in space and time using literary montage in a riverscape shaped by forces that have long exceeded the modernist projects of empires, socialist federations, and national republics.