Liminal Waterway Countercultures - Rivers in Crisis

Led by literary scholars Dr. Yvonne Zivkovic and Dr. Stefanie Populorum, this interdisciplinary, multilingual, and transnational project explores literary and filmic narratives of risk and opportunity resulting from the geographical and cultural connections between the rivers Danube, Drava and Drina. Located at the intersection of German and South Slavic Studies, the project investigates those three liminal waterways as borders and passageways that connect Austria and the Western Balkans in the cultural imagination through diverse challenges and mitigations. Over the course of the next two years, our team will explore literary and filmic representations of these rivers, which see them not only as commercially significant transport routes for international trade and production but also highlight their role as crucial identifiers for collective belonging and national heritage. Due to their function as liminal contact points for different linguistic, ethnic, and religious populations, these rivers have always been subjected to complex power dynamics, in which notions of purity and ownership were consistently pitted against the hybridity and transnationality of these natural spaces. But despite efforts to control the Danube, Drava, and Drina through increased river engineering (straightening, damming, deforestation) and monitoring measures (barriers, surveillance technology, patrols), these waterways have remained volatile sites of natural and human crisis (such as floods, draughts, human trafficking, and migration). The project investigates how Austrian and (ex)-Yugoslav prose, travelogues, folk tales, poetry, and film from the First World War until today relate to ecological, economic and political crises through the motif and trope of rivers (taking the Danube, Drava and Drina rivers as the main case studies). By creating a transnational map of literary and filmic river narratives, this project will foreground the cultural ties created within this transnational river network through experiences of crisis, as well as the possible strategies for individual and collective resilience that arise from them.