The lived Nile : environment, disease, and material colonial economy in Egypt / Jennifer L. Derr.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-229) and index.

Introduction : a river, remade : making subjects on the perennial Nile -- Nile articulations : decolonizing the history of irrigation engineering -- The dammed Nile : the thirty-year project to build Khazan Aswan -- Beyond the frontier : negotiating the geography of authority in Egypt's south -- Cruel summer : environmental labors and the scales of subject making -- Treated subjects : irrigating the veins of the nation -- Conclusion : the afterlives of the perennial subject.

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity. Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.-- Provided by publisher.

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