WATER BODY CHRONICLES OF VENICE AND NEW ORLEANS / BVLBANCHA Narrative Entanglements Among Two Estuaries and Their Human and Multispecies Residents Through Time

Water bodies engendered the mystique, rise, and cultural renown of Venice and New Orleans. These cities also systematically manipulated those water bodies, along with human and animal residents, to achieve imperial, colonial and market aims. The resulting amplification of material, biological and social repercussions over time transformed each city into a global forbearer of challenging environmental futures that other such economically and politically situated estuarine cities now face worldwide. This thesis engages multiple environmental humanities disciplines within a dynamic, estuarine-inspired framework to chronicle layered water body relations expressed by predominant historical accounts as well as those of artists, authors, indigenous inhabitants, people escaping slavery, locally raised residents, aquatic animals, and water bodies. Two time period assemblages, on archaeology and on media and culture, bookend the Contents in order to materialize intra-acting dynamics within the estuaries from before the cities existed to the present. The four chapters can be read in any order. Woven together by my own posthuman ecofeminist critical POV, each one interlays a specific humanities disciplinary approach with historical and current narratives. These layers reveal submerged intra-acting cycles of adapting, resisting or realigning that entwine within systemic cycles of othering, disrupting, objectifying, commodifying and/or oppressing. This approach de-centers certain human participants who impose themselves onto center stage, while ethically demanding their accountability. It also obscures categorizations of time, place, ontologies, and human-nature dualism.