Roll, Jordan, Roll: Stereographic River, Colonial Hydropolitics

In African American spirituals, the Jordan was a river most singers would never reach. In Palestine, a river people drew from, crossed, and gathered beside has been pushed out of reach over the course of a century. In this essay, Manar Moursi traces that transformation through photographs that pictured the river in very different ways: Underwood & Underwood stereographs selling the Jordan to Western parlors, American Colony negatives of laborers working in the water under watch, aerial views of Rutenberg's hydroelectric works, and Palestinian family photographs of days spent beside the river. Across these images, immersion shifts meaning, from rite to labor, flight, and pleasure, while surveying, allocation, engineering, and enclosure turn proximity to the river into distance. Printed as a companion to Blue-Black Liver, the essay grew out of Moursi's lecture performance with poems from that book, presented at Agit, Berlin, and Tintera, Cairo, in 2025.