WATER AS A CAPITALIST COMMODITY IN THE CAPITALOCENE: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF PAOLO BACIGALUPI’S THE WATER KNIFE
Keywords:
Capitalocene, Climate Fiction, Eco-criticism, Environmental justice, Water ScarcityAbstract
This paper presents the theoretical analysis of The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (2015) with the use of the Capitalocene to prove that water scarcity in the novel does not appear as a natural or a purely climatic crisis, but a structural result of capitalistic accumulation. Taking the idea of Jason W. Moore about capitalism as an ecological regime, the paper will analyze the way in which water is converted into an ecological common to a commodity and a legally regulated property. The paper reveals the ways in which senior water rights, corporate governance, and juridical abstraction restructure the ecological flows, resulting in the creation of dispossession, inequality, and violence through close textual analysis. The novel shows water as commodity, infrastructure and weapon by revealing how capitalist enclosure alienates ecological systems to lived experience. By placing The Water Knife into current discourses of climate justice and privatization of resources, this paper develops an ecocritical approach to predict the future as a result of the Capitalocene, in which environmental disaster is a systematic outcome rather than an external shock.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Mussab Iqbal, Faiza Khan (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
