The Aquatic Presence-Absence in World Literatures

Critical Language and Literary Studies (CLLS) invites original, unpublished research articles for a themed issue to be published in Fall 2026. The theme is examining aquatic presences and absences in world literatures.

Water has always been a fundamental essence with semiotic, symbolic, and political representations in nations’ imagination. Considering the accelerating climate crises, such as rising seas, droughts, melting glaciers, polluted rivers, and water wars, literature stands as a critically lucid kaleidoscope that reveals the underlying meanings of aquatic presence and absence. This special issue of Critical Language and Literary Studies invites contributions that examine water as a core ecocritical concern, with particular emphasis on blue ecocriticism and its intersections with world literatures. Blue ecocriticism examines oceans, seas, rivers, wetlands, and other aquatic bodies, challenging land-centered models of ecological thought and literary analysis. At the same time, the absence of water in the form of water scarcity, dryness, drought, and desiccation raises urgent critical, ethical, political, and aesthetic concerns, especially in postcolonial, Indigenous, capitalist, and Global South contexts. This issue explores how literary texts represent, narrate, contest, and reconfigure human and nonhuman connections with water across cultures, languages, and historical divisions.

We welcome theoretically informed and textually grounded essays that engage ecocriticism, blue humanities, environmental (in-)justice, postcolonialism, posthumanism, Indigenous studies, and related critical frameworks in their textual examination. Potential themes include, but are not limited to:

• Blue ecocriticism and the oceanic imagination
• Water as essential Object: Object-Oriented Ontology and the metaphorized absent waters
• Rivers, seas, and coastlines in world literatures
• Water scarcity, drought, and narratives of absence
• Floods, submersion, and climate catastrophe in fiction and poetry
• Indigenous, postcolonial, and Global South water epistemologies
• Maritime modernity, migration, and watery borders
• Gender, race, and environmental (in-)justice in water narratives
• Water as archive, memory, and trauma
• Aquatic nonhuman life and posthuman ecologies
• Toxic waters, pollution, and extractivism
• Aquatic absences and slow violence
• Comparative and multilingual approaches to water narratives

Submission timeline/guidelines:

• Full papers will be due by August 10, 2026;
• The issue will be published in Fall 2026.

Important notes:

• Referencing style: Chicago (in-text citation; no footnotes)
• Article length: 7000 words including abstract, keywords, References

Submission:

Full articles should be submitted via journal's website. Please make sure you check "Guide for Authors". 

Inquiries:

For informal inquiries please don't hesitate to contact the editor-in-chief.

Journal website:

https://clls.sbu.ac.ir/?lang=en