Unabsorbed: Assemblages and spectres of contested Welsh waterscapes

What does it mean for waters, places, and people to resist their absorption by the expansive logics of capital and the state? This paper interrogates the politics of unabsorbed life and matter through the case of the Tryweryn valley in North Wales, whose flooding to create a reservoir supplying Liverpool entailed the drowning of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in 1965. This became a touchstone in Welsh cultural memory and British hydropolitics, but its relevance extends far beyond, revealing the enduring mobilities of water, resistance, and memory, leaking across times and geographies. Focusing on three key moments of activism - the 1956 ‘Hands Off Tryweryn' march, the militant campaign of bombings and sabotage in the 1960s, and the creation and persistence of the ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn' (‘Remember Tryweryn') mural - I trace the mobilisation of water’s meanings and materialities to contest the extractive logics behind the reservoir. Following Raymond Williams' statement that such movements emerged from ‘unabsorbed' places and subjects, I take seriously this aqueous framing of incorporation (or not) by capital and the state, to ask how the Tryweryn campaigns expressed the ‘politics of the unabsorbed', extending this through a political-ecological framework informed by Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. In addition to its close analysis of the case, and its demonstration of water as a constitutive feature of political formations, the article therefore contributes a novel framework for analysing and evaluating territorial resistance politics, as complex, open processes centred on dismantling the material and poetic assemblages of absorption. The seasonal reappearance of Capel Celyn's ruins in drought-stricken summers reveals that absorption is never total. As climate crisis redraws global hydrosocial relations, Tryweryn’s waters continue to unsettle, resonating beyond their local context, and offering both a warning and a resource for imagining solidarity in a drowning world.