نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

Hydrological Epistemicide and Epistemic Disobedience in Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسنده
Mohammad Bagher Shabanpour
English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran
10.48308/clls.2026.245896.1507
چکیده
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch narrates the slow dissolution of a village during Iran’s 1963 White Revolution, as extractive modernity severs communal ties to subsurface water flows by replacing millennia-old qanats with mechanized deep wells. This article argues that the novel encodes the destruction of the indigenous qanat system as hydrological epistemicide, and that Mergan’s embodied water memory constitutes an act of epistemic disobedience against the coloniality of modern water management. While the previous critical literature on the novel has treated drought as a sociological backdrop, this study demonstrates, through a combined lens of Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia and Walter Mignolo’s border thinking, that the loss of an indigenous hydrological epistemology governs the narrative’s deepest logic. The analysis is done in three steps. First, it reveals how the maintenance of qanat and communal water distribution creates a topophilic moral economy, that is, a sacred geography of shared ritual and non-commodified obligation. Second, it traces the landscape of fear produced by epistemicide to show that Soluch’s disappearance erases qanat knowledge, that the dried well becomes a death trap, and that Hajer’s forced marriage exposes the connection between water extractivism and patriarchal violence. Finally, it reads Mergan’s bodily defiance, including her refusal to sell land, her endurance in fetching water, and her corporeal inscription of drought, as Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience, which transforms her body into a living archive of indigenous hydrological memory. By situating Missing Soluch within Global South ecocritical debates, the paper reframes modern Persian fiction as a significant but often overlooked source of water knowledge that preserves what developmentalist modernity erases.
کلیدواژه‌ها
Missing Soluch
Hydrological Epistemicide
Topophilia
Border Thinking
Qanat
Indigenous Hydrological Memory
Epistemic Disobedience
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