Between 2014 and 2020, an estimated 141,000 homes were disconnected from clean drinking water in the majority-Black city of Detroit, MI, because of unpaid bills. This not only caused severe psychological distress to affected residents but also made them more susceptible to waterborne diseases like Hepatitis, and contributed to the rapid spread of COVID-19 in the city. In this essay, I argue that hydrocolonialism, an emerging framework from the humanities that has mainly been used to trace the historical actions of waterborne colonial powers can be extended to theorize the neocolonial logics and practices underlying water affordability even in the Global North. Specifically, in U.S. cities, urban hydrocolonialism works to prioritize austerity and financial creditworthiness, commodify water as an extractive resource, and perpetuate racist tropes targeting low-income minoritized residents, while ignoring their elevated health risks. Drawing from critical ethnography between 2018 and 2020, I focus here on the role of institutional narratives of crisis, place, and agency, which distort the lived experiences and social histories of Black and Brown residents, to enact urban hydrocolonialism. I also present examples of activist counternarratives that successfully resisted hydrocolonialism and sought to rehabilitate care-centered modes of public health.
Rahul Mitra (Thu,) studied this question.