Critical Language and Literary Studies

Critical Language and Literary Studies

Margaret Wrinkle’s Wash: Water, Memory, and Terraqueous Ecocriticism

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author
Zahra Taheri
Department of Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Kashan, Iran
10.48308/clls.2026.245716.1493
Abstract
Slave narratives from the American South are primarily situated in “land” as the status of freedom or slavery is determined by land boundaries. Terms such as the frontier or the plantation, which appear so frequently in these narratives, also foreground the centrality of land. Consequently, most current ecocritical readings of slave narratives are landlocked and limited in scope, portraying nature as a politically charged, racialized concept associated with the physical violence enacted against slaves in woods and plantations. In these readings, the natural world, as Evelyn White (1995) observes, functions as a “repository for racial terror”—a framing that reduces nature to a complicit ally of the oppressive white system. This overly narrow definition not only eliminates the role aquatic realms—the Middle Passage and ancestral memory—play in these narratives but also dismisses nature as an agent of resistance that challenges white supremacy. This study offers a close reading of Margaret Wrinkle’s Wash (2013), employing a blue humanities framework that brings Dan Brayton’s and Anissa Wardi’s theoretical frameworks into dialogue. Reading Brayton’s emphasis on the materiality of water against Wardi’s conception of water as a site of memory, trauma, and resistance, it discusses how water enables cultural continuity through “limbo time” and anti-conformist” identity. In this way, this study challenges the anthropocentric treatment of water as backdrop and recasts it as the present site of historical memory forging intergenerational links.
Keywords
aquatic realm
memory repository
the Middle Passage
the planation
Wash
Subjects

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Critical Language and Literary Studies
Volume 23, Issue 38 - Serial Number 15
English (Themed Issue)
Autumn 2026
Pages 81-91