Blue Humanities

(excerpt) "We should indeed look to watery natures for inspiration. We are all part of an oceanic commons that sustains and bonds all life. Turning to water as design muse can thus be understood as a moment of recognition, where our own watery natures are amplified. But when we hail the ocean as teacher, do we also consider the silent slippage between gift and theft, between use and usurpation? What happens when the sea ceases to be an unknowable mystery, and is figured instead as inexhaustible resource? Water—as substance or idea—cannot be simply ours for the taking."

I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small islands. In this unholy trinity of Irma, José, and Maria, these mergers are violent and deadly. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that Barbuda, thought to have been 90% destroyed (like Anguilla) by Hurricane Irma, became a "paradise transformed to hell." The category 5 Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the fresh water supply and infrastructure in Dominica and Puerto Rico, was thought to be the strongest Atlantic storm on record. Hurricane Irma flooded seawater as far as a third of a mile inland in Cuba. Beach sand covered the region’s major arteries, which are still unpassable in many places, weeks after the storm. Twenty-five foot waves pounded the shores, while coastal surges were measured at over six feet in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Due to the record-breaking levels of rain, an 11-billion gallon dam in Puerto Rico began to fail. Irma’s winds were so strong they literally pulled water out of the ocean and dried out beaches in the Bahamas and created watery bulges elsewhere.  In report after eyewitness report the language to encapsulate these unprecedented violent weather events fails. Instead the language of apocalypse prevails to describe what is “catrastrophic,” “precarious,” “total devastation,” and “hell.”

The Oceanic Turn: We are witnessing an interdisciplinary transition to what might be called " critical ocean studies " that reflects an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place. This has much to do with a new oceanic imaginary emerging in the wake of the knowledge of anthropogenic climate change and sea-level rise. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its multispe-cies engagements are the focus of this paper, particularly their implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. The oceanic turn of the twentieth century issued from geopolitics as well as new interdisciplinary groupings in the humanities and social sciences. It can be traced to the 1945 Truman Proclamation — the most significant, and yet largely unre-marked, twentieth-century remapping of the globe — which extended U.S. territory to include a two-hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see DeLoughrey, Routes). This created a scramble for the oceans, catalyzing EEZ declarations by nations all over the world and a U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet. Although largely unnoticed by new disciplinary groupings such as the " Blue Humanities " (Mentz), Cold War geopolitics had a decisive influence in configuring a new understanding of the terraqueous globe. The second catalyst for the rise of critical ocean studies was the post-1970s " spatial turn, " which led to the emergence of globalization and diaspora studies. Marx-ist geography was integral to defining the post-Fordist era of global capitalism and relations of labor to space. This loosening of nationally-bounded modes of thinking about capital and space led to an unprecedented number of transoceanic studies, notably the work of Marcus Rediker, which helped to inspire Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, a text that inaugurated a new generation of thinking about race in transoceanic ways.

This essay makes a case for the categories of littoral literature and coastal form through which it aims to take up the expansive possibilities of the maritime turn while keeping both the materiality of the ocean and the locality of the shore in sight. It elaborates the notion of coastal form through a focus on the African Indian Ocean littoral and with reference to the oeuvres of Mia Couto and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are shown to muddle the inside-outside binary that delineates nations and continents, and which has been particularly stark in framing Africa in both imperial and nativist thought. At the same time, coastal form is found to decenter, extend and thicken constructions of world literature, while opening to a planetary perspective sensible to the prodigious and implacable forces of the Anthropocene.

Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art
Routledge, 2020

Editors: Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez
With contributions from Lisa Blackmore, Liliana Gómez, Adriana Johnson,  Rory O’Bryen, Gina McDaniel Tarver, Giuliana Borea & Rember Yahuarcani, Esther Moñivas, Irene Depetris Chauvin, Elizabeth DeLoughrey & Tatiana Flores, Paul Merchant, Sophie Halart.

Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art is a new interdisciplinary volume that brings into dialogue research on how different fluids and bodies of water are mobilised as liquid ecologies in the arts. Examining the visual arts, including multimedia installations, performance, photography, and film, the chapters place diverse fluids and systems of flow in art historical, ecocritical, and cultural analytical contexts. The contributions address a wide range of phenomena, probing the historical and political, cultural and environmental impacts of colonisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation in Latin America and the Caribbean through analyses of multimedia installations, performance, photography, film, poetry and testimony. Together, they address critical genealogies of liquids and fluidity, and analyse aesthetic interventions that mobilize and recreate different fluids and flows to restage their absence, scarcity, vital materiality, and to rethink the relationships between periphery and metropolis, and their related forms of knowledge and knowledge practices. The book thus traces cultural histories and analyses of hydrological and hydraulic projects centred on the engineering of bodies of water and consider shifts in their semantic, sensorial, and social orders amid contexts of political and environmental violence and conflict. The dynamic movements of liquid run through this book in configurations and situations that reframe liquids and fluidity never as pure, abstract flow, but as contingent instances of contamination, overflow, counterflow, stasis, vortex, and reflux.

The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, environmental humanities, ecological humanities, blue humanities, ecocriticism, Latin American studies, and island studies.

This story-based journey is an eclectic discussion on marine plastic pollution. It responds to the Environmental Humanities by bringing material history, personal experiences as well as ecotheories and natural sciences together. The conversational style, like shifting tides, speaks to anyone who wishes to develop a broader understanding on plastic pollution and its ecological consequences. While much of the scientific data has been drawn from specialist journals such as Marine Pollution Bulletin and UN-Oceans, it is the mostly shared experiences on the World Ocean that inform this study such as dialogues and stories spoken by blue activists, general audiences, local groups, fishermen, researchers, students, scientists, surfers, sailors, divers, day-trippers, ferry crews, port authorities and marine protection societies. These voices speak from a position of ecocosmopolitanism on wide-ranging issues such as indifference, world-systems, modernity, ecological literatures, a common geostory, biosemiotics, the Anthropocene as well as Planetary Boundaries. By acknowledging that the World Ocean and its qualities have come to symbolise a fluid globalising world economy, alternative themes surface such as permeability, flows, agencies, loss, renewed sense of place, cross-species entanglements, peace and sustainability. The debates edge along fairly freely yet engage with three original ideas, namely: (1) plastic pollution may impact the climate more severely than the actual circulating concepts on climate change; (2) critical levels in the environment have been reached and this should, therefore, be part of a Planetary Boundary within "Novel entities" as it adversely affects the Earth’s systems; and (3) the question of language and how new education curricula centred around ecolinguistics and a shared geostory would better inform our environmental relations and altruistic natures. As presented here, plastic pollution is at its heart a debate involving a moral reassessment and appreciation of Planet Ocean, which constitutes our greatest personal gift - the "common heritage of humankind."

Rupert J. M. Medd, words and photographs, www.instagram.com/eyesotherwise
Hélène Guyot, illustrations, www.firstrainofsummer.com

The first major ethnography of reef scientists, Coral Whisperers, begins with a clear distinction between hope and despair, but Irus Braverman’s ultimate goal is to reveal the ways these positions are “interconnected and even co-dependant” among those working on reef futures in laboratories and lagoons. Moving beyond extremes, she claims, might “show us the way out” of our apocalyptic trajectory. Her ethnography uses a fast-moving set of narratives based on interviews with 100 coral scientists and reef managers to show that these researchers are more than just experts on reefs: they are “spokespeople” and “guides” that might lead other conservationists—and all of us—“through the perils of the Anthropocene.” Part of the reason why that these Charon-like scientists can take leading roles, she claims, is because corals are “good to think with"—a phrase that appears in many multispecies studies, borrowed from the English translation of Levi-Strauss’ Totemism (1962). Braverman uses “good to think with” in a familiar multispecies register, but the coral thinking that she reveals—through a detailed retelling of competing scientific narratives—is neither easy nor good. Corals, it seems, are incredibly difficult to think with. They make trouble for seemingly stable categories of nature, life, death, and law as scientists attempt to speak for and with them.

Our blue planet is a watery world, yet only one percent of earth’s most abundant molecule is both accessible and fresh. Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were most likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds.

Most commonly sacred springs, holy “wells” can be any natural source of fresh water that is a focus for ritual practice and engagement with the supernatural. Containing the majority of the earth’s liquid surface fresh water, lakes are sometimes called holy wells, as can be the spring sources of rivers, ponds and swamps. Often associated with also venerated stones, trees and healing flora, sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity.

Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and across multiple time periods, this volume identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry. Addressing holy wells and their associated sacred landscapes as sites of biocultural heritage, the book’s introduction examines cultural perceptions of water’s sacrality that can be employed to foster socio-ecological resilience in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century.

Irreplaceable resources of archaeological, historical, spiritual and community significance, holy wells also serve as conservation patches for particular species of trees, plants and animals. Curative folk liturgies have developed in response to the unique arrangements of the natural and built features in each well’s landscape setting. Holy wells and their immediate landscape contexts are ecosystems in themselves; otherwise rare flora and fauna flourish in these often sheltered sites. The healing properties of flora thriving near wells are linked to the cures with which wells are “blessed.” Holy wells are nodes of both cultural heritage and biological diversity. Considering the relationship between therapeutic wells and their associated flora and fauna, this essay presents holy wells as sites of biocultural diversity (where culture and biology are interrelated and even co-evolved). Understanding generationally-layered local ecological knowledge and cultural values that designate water sources as sacred is valuable for strategizing socio-ecological resilience in the face of predicted water crises.

[This is a pre-print draft of an article to appear in a special issue on “Dependencies” of New Formations, edited by Claire Westall, Joe Jackson, and Michael Gardiner. Please do not cite with requesting permission.]

In this essay I wish to examine ‘hydro-dependency’ in the neoliberal era, exploring the cultural patterning and representations corresponding to the socio-ecological relations organizing the extraction, production, and consumption of water both as commodity and as energy in the neoliberal regime of the capitalist world-ecology. I will investigate how the specific infrastructures of riparian water management and hydropower - the pipeline and the dam - are mediated in world-literary hydropoetry and hydrofiction and the ways in which they are depicted as producing path-dependence and asymmetric distribution. However, I will also demonstrate how texts resist the moralizing language of dependency and instead reconceive water in terms of interdependence and hydrosocial interrelation, thus countering the hegemonic discourses through which flowing water is transformed into exchangeable, quantifiable commodities or forms of energy. In these, the contradictions facing the appropriation strategies of ‘cheap water’ and ‘extreme water’ are imagined not just in terms of pathologized social addiction or exhaustion of particular technics of water management, but as opportunities for resistance and transformation.

Starting from the observation that the notion of the Anthropocene invites us to alter the ways in which we imagine human life (and the relations between different human lives), this essay argues that transnational accounts of literature and culture—in the fairly new field of oceanic studies, for instance—need to expand their scope from intercultural relations to include the relationships between different (human) forms of life and (human as well as nonhuman) life forms. The essay develops this argument through a dialogue between J. M. Ledgard's planetary novel Submergence from 2011 and contemporary theories of the posthuman (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker) and the Anthropocene (Ian Baucom, Dipesh Chakrabarty), in order to demonstrate that the literary novel has a vital role to play in the imagining of new forms of (non)human relatedness. Developing Submergence's distinction between the (radically nonhuman) ocean and the (human-related) sea, the essay puts forward the argument that human life in the Anthropocene is marked by what the essay theorizes, with the help of Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin, as “immemorial life”: a relation to radically nonhuman life forms that cannot be actualized in the imagining and remembering of human life in the Anthropocene.

Niebieska humanistyka (Blue Humanities) to dynamicznie rozwijający się posthumanistyczny nurt myślowy, osadzający historię życia w oceanie. Zgodnie z tym przekonaniem naszą planetę powinniśmy nazywać Oceanem, a nie Ziemią, gdyż wody stanowią około 70 proc. powierzchni ziemskiego globu. Steve Mentz, jeden z teoretyków zwrotu oceanicznego we współczesnej humanistyce, zwraca uwagę na to, że jeśli pragniemy zrozumieć dynamiczne przemiany epoki antropocenu, powinniśmy odejść od statycznych kategorii zielonych pól, ogrodów oraz żyznych gruntów, których uprawa niesie ze sobą opowieści o przetrwaniu nierozerwalnie związane ze stabilnością i przewidywalnością. W jego rozważaniach pierwszorzędne znaczenie mają niespokojne wody, niosące nieustanne zagrożenie katastrofą (wrak, rozbitek) oraz figury żeglarzy i pływaków unoszących się na wodzie, stale przebywających w niebezpiecznym środowisku. Z kolei Astrida Neimanis, związana z tradycją feministycznego nowego materializmu, podkreśla życiodajną i jednocześnie niezwykle kreatywną rolę oceanów, które w swoich niezbadanych głębinach wytwarzają wiele różnorodnych, niesamowitych nie-ludzkich ciał. Woda w jej rozważaniach staje się nie tylko gwarantką materialnej, cielesnej zmienności, lecz przede wszystkim zawsze zaskakującej, niczym nieskrępowanej naturokulturowej twórczości. Podejmując trop wskazany przez Neimanis, chciałbym przyjrzeć się artystycznym manifestacjom oceanu w filmowych obrazach Heleny Wittmann oraz Lucile Hadžihalilović, a także pokazać, w jaki sposób Olafur Eliasson upomina się o utracone ludzkie relacje z żywiołem wody. Zależy mi głównie na tym, aby ukazać związane z wodami praktyki materialno-dyskursywne. Chcę przyjrzeć się temu, w jaki sposób materialny ocean wytwarza symboliczne znaczenie, oraz pokazać, że reżyserki oprócz typowych dla klasycznej sztuki artystycznych środków wyrazu (reprezentacji i metafor) próbują za pomocą swoich filmów wytworzyć w widzach również pewnego rodzaju oceaniczne doświadczenie.

Accepted version of article published in Textual Practice, 2020.

In recent years ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have undergone a 'hydrological turn', sometimes referred to as the emergence of the 'blue humanities'. This 'turn' has, however, typically focused on the maritime and oceanic rather than the fresh water essential for the reproduction of much life on earth. In this article I analyse contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong's 2015 collection undercurrent for thematic and formal insights into how dominant ways of understanding water have enabled its exploitation within the capitalist world-system. I argue that Wong's poetry resists a concept that geographer Jamie Linton calls 'modern water' (2010: 14), or water as ultimately reducible to abstract molecules of 'H₂O' circulating within the hydrological cycle. Wong's poems illustrate how this concept has facilitated the exhaustion and contamination of the world's water in the pursuit of profit, amplifying these concerns in formal strategies that situate local Canadian water histories within what Jason W. Moore describes as capitalism's 'world-ecological regime'. I combine world-systems theory with Indigenous, ecofeminist and posthumanist thought to show how Wong's poetry models non-anthropocentric modes of relating to water and other water-dependent beings that move towards environmental justice.

If, as Jacques Rancière argues, “politics is an intervention into the visible,” is it possible that the current “bloom” of jellyfish images opens up space for gelata and other non-mammalian sea creatures to provoke posthuman modes of environmental concern? Do these watery creatures, barely distinguishable
from their surroundings, suggest the need for a more aquatic environmentalism to emerge, not only from a global mapping of toxic flows and the ravages of industrial extractions but also from some scarcely possible engagement with the heretofore unknown and still barely known if not potentially unknowable forms of life that inhabit the depths?

In recent years, the vast and expansive oeuvre of cultural critic and theorist Sylvia Wynter has received enthusiastic response from a seemingly ever-increasing group of scholars. Drawing from and contributing to this great interest in Wynter’s writings, this essay further elucidates and build upon one of her often referenced concepts: “demonic ground.” Despite Wynter’s use of the terrestrial term “ground,” I argue that the concept is fundamentally oceanic. I then build on this insight and the work of Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye and others to coin “demonic ocean” as an alternative vantage point of Black study. The article brings together scholarship in religious studies, Black studies, and the blue humanities.

South Africa boasts an extensive coastline that stretches over 2,800 kilometres and is alternately caressed and pounded by two oceans, which have produced a chain of golden sandy beaches along its shores. Yet compared to other sites, the beach does not feature very prominently in South African literary culture and is even less visible in literary criticism. The farm, the bushveld and the arid karoo; city, town and village: all have accrued layers of inscription while the beach sits almost silent at the edge of the South African literary and critical imagination. Its relative muteness is at least in part dictated by the lack of space accorded to levity and the ludic in South African letters, burdened as they have been with seeking to bear the weight of the experiences of colonial dispossession and apartheid oppression and of representing struggle and strife.

Bodies of Water explores what it means to be a watery body in a watery world, specifically at a time of hydro-ecological precarity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist theory, it articulates embodied phenomenology with posthumanism to produce a mode of inquiry that pays close attention to our own (differently situated) implication in watery environmental matters. This selection is a preview (pre-copyediting) of the Introduction. The book will be published by Bloomsbury (Environmental Cultures series) in January 2017. An HTML open access of the entire text can be found here:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/bodies-of-water-posthuman-feminist-phenomenology/

The recent efflorescence of fictional writings and artistic works examined under the rubrics of Blue Humanities (Mentz 2009), Critical Ocean Studies (DeLoughrey 2019), Hydro-Criticism (Winkiel 2019), or New Thalassology (Horden and Purcell 2006), testify a recent cultural shift from the land to the sea. In this article, the hydrosphere is analysed in two female Afrofuturist works – Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) – to address the global capitalist order and to imagine an aquafuturist multispecies aesthetics that springs from the countermemory of the Middle Passage and its undersea myths.

I have been working on a lesson plan designed to get young people excited about the ocean, excited about science and technology, excited about music, excited about literature, excited about Afrofuturism, and excited about environmental activism. I think Drexciya's music and mythology could be a great way to do some of those things.

I geared the lesson toward middle school and high school students, but it could probably be used for both younger and older students.

The first lesson is entitled "Drexciya and Our Ocean Planet," which focuses on the ocean as a marine environment. I am working on a second lesson plan, "Drexciya and the Middle Passage," which will deal with the famous liner notes to The Quest, which speculate about the origins of Drexciyans.

I've never made a lesson plan like this before, so I have no idea if this is something that teachers could use or would be interesting for students. I included a "Rough Teacher's Guide" with a few ideas about possible discussion topics and approaches. I'm sending it as a Word document so people can cut and paste and modify as they see fit. Feel free to share with anyone who you think might be interested.

If anyone has suggestions, feel free to pass them on.

To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi- tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into  focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths.

Indigenous writers of the Pacific Islands have often turned to the ways in which the long history of transoceanic voyaging has contributed to a concept of the “sea in the blood,” a merger of biological and genealogical histories. In this paper I trace out this concept of the sea in the blood and its potential for a dynamic rendering of queer kinship with our nonhuman others by turning to Keri Hulme’s collection, Stonefish (2004), which inscribes the ways in which rising sea levels generate adaptive mutations in plants, mushrooms, and even humans. Through experiments in form, Hulme’s collection makes a vital intervention into these fantastic, utopian, and dystopian visions of the oceanic, rendering the sea, climate change, mutation and the submarine as profoundly ordinary. She depicts creeping sea level rising in terms that emphasize mutation and adaptation rather than the spectacular tone of apocalypse.  Through a hybrid narrative style she parodies heteronormative modes of millenialist fiction, particularly the American nuclear narratives that arose out of the Cold War. By invoking  "anthropophagic oysters," mushrooms that when eaten will collapse human cell walls, and sentient moonfish, abalone, and even plastic bottles, Hulme poses a fluid “waterworld” of queer kinship, an ontology of what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” inscribing figures that are deeply tied to the seascape of Aotearoa/New Zealand and the beginnings and endings of Maori cosmologies. The emergence of what she calls an “unseen neural network” inscribes new morphologies for an increasingly maritime world arising from an era of climate change.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how Indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the 'cultural fix' and 'fixed labour-power' (Shapiro 2014, 2020), this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado's Mar Morto (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms over the poverty of the text's working-class community of dockworkers with an ominous and mysterious edge. By contrast, the water-spirit in Pepetela's novel O Desejo de Kianda (1995) is angry, active and only too immediate, seeking revenge for the extractivist violence carried out in the name of neoliberalism. Activating a broadly hydro-materialist framework, I argue that these differing conceptions of the water-spirit carry with them very different socio-ecological implications, and directly intersect with contemporary debates over hydrological crisis, the privatisation of the oceans and the enclosure of the water commons.

This paper is a longer version of a talk first given at the Ecocultures conference in Glasgow, October 2016. An  article version has been published in Atlantic Studies 16.1(2019: https://doi-org.ucd.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.1412181

. The paper examines world-literary representations of the crisis of “cheap water”: the exhaustion of water frontiers, technical intensification of extraction, and manufacture of water scarcity by the neoliberal hydrological regime.  I investigate how water functions in neoliberal hydrofiction as material element, but also as representation and symbolic regime, product and producer of the socio-ecological relations stabilizing the neoliberal organization of water. Thus, the essay interrogates how hydrofictions act as “cultural fixes” with diagnostic or subversive functions within the capitalist world-ecology: anticipating, stabilizing, or contesting dominant epistemes and technics. I begin with trans-hemispheric analysis of Latin American and Chinese hydrofictions, Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Chen Jiagong’s “Number Nine Winch Alley” (1981)  that anticipate intensified enclosure of water commons at the moment of the neoliberal turn, before moving to an analysis of twenty-first century novels that register China’s contemporary water crisis: Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (2006) and Ma Jian’s The Dark Road (2012). I argue that these hydrofictions display similar tendencies towards hydro-irrealism that underscore the limits of the hydrological regime: a preponderance of tropes of draining, sucking, dessication, and empty veins; plots which tend towards repetition, circularity and flux; narration marked by the spectral and the blackly absurd; macabre and gothic atmospheres of death-in-life. I complete my trans-hemispheric triangulation of water crisis by moving to two prominent examples of millennial “hydro cli-fi” from the US and Finland that portray “water shock” in autumnal cores, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015) and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2014). Where the Chinese hydrofictions primarily treat water crisis as an expression of internal contradictions in the current regime, articulated from the perspectives of the peasants who bear their costs, these Euro-American cli-fis articulate crisis through paranoiac, outward-looking discourses of China as simultaneously technotopian and hydrocolonialist, focalized through middle-class protagonists. Their impulse is diagnostic, seeking to anticipate the future of the world-ecology after climate change and the end of “cheap water,” but also regulatory, projecting Euro-American fears of a new hydrological revolution as the basis for Chinese ascendancy.

This article examines Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s 1960s concept of Homo aquaticus in relation to three documentaries. A utopian variant of Homo sapiens that Cousteau forecast would evolve to live and work undersea, Homo aquaticus also appeared at a time when Western nations regarded the sea primarily as an exploitable resource. Cousteau’s films give expression to this idea aesthetically, in the undersea life they depict and in the array of diving technologies and underwater habitats they showcase, apparatuses that extended human reach underwater. By emphasizing Cousteau’s vanguard figure of the underwater man, this article shifts scholarly focus from Cousteau’s celebrity, his conservationist stances, and his films’ representations of wildlife to a central paradox of his early films: a poetic vision of freedom from the surface that is bound to a project of ocean domination.

This article investigates the terraqueous entanglements of
human and marine life in material and discursive contexts through
an aquatic practice of material ecocritical theory. Material ecocriticism
encourages us to read the ecology of the planet’s protean seas by way
of their storied dimension, and to think the blue humanities and the
discoveries of marine sciences through one another, in creative ways.
In this context, two interlinked questions surface. 1. How do we theorize
the seascapes whose materiality is hydrous without obfuscating
its reality in figurative conceptualizing? 2. If our knowledge of the
sea depends on how it is represented, and interpreted, will the sea’s
biogeophysical existence cease to exist? I argue that the meanings of
the sea always remain in the interstice between the discursive and the
real, and that the experience of the sea gains meaning only in their
corollary dynamics.

Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime "choke points." Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez.

Scientific, journalistic, photographic, and artistic accounts of the effects of the BP oil and dispersant on specific ocean creatures, systems, and processes are cnrcial for rendering the ocean not as an alien or immaterial domain, but as a complex and dynamic environment that is significantly different from, yet interconnected
with, the landscapes humans inhabit. Ocean creatures call on us to stretch our ability to cuceptralize life itselt so that we will be more mindful and protective of environments that barery register on anthropocentric horizons as living places.
Rather than projecting outer-space fantasies onto the deep seas, or using them as the proving ground for xenobiology, we need to remain-with the assistance of deep sea submersibles and other scientific and technological apparatuses-in the Gulf of Mexico and in other oceanic places around the grlbe in order to assess the
avalanche of anthropogenic damages and to construct the most effective methods, policies, and social movements to minimize further harm. It may not be possible to cultivate meaningfur modes of cornection to oceanic creatures that arc so far removed
from human rives-a jellyfish is an unlikely candidate for a companion species"s-but we could at least stop indulging in magical thinking that the ocean is impervious to human harm. Staying focused on the lives or sp""in" animarsrather
than evoking the ocean as a vast void-may be a way to ioster movementsfor ocean conservation, movements that, despite the dreadfui state of ocean health, are not at all inevitable.

Seeking to reflect on the shore, this essay attempts an immanent and mimetic method that approaches its subject in a manner informed by its own properties and practices. The coast is by nature non-linear and functions through fluctuance. It affords a mode of thought that ebbs and floods and in which meaning surfaces only to be again submerged, in which images and ideas silt up only to erode into dispersed sediments that will be deposited on other shores. Its peculiar logic is simultaneously random and systematic, variable and repetitive. Generated by inexorable rhythmic forces, it is also directed by serendipity: it is structured by tides, currents and winds that are alternatively periodic and spasmodic, and which deliver various fragments of flotsam to shore. It is composed of miscellaneous things and distributed agencies that gather into transitory assemblages, before dissipating and regrouping elsewhere. Experimenting with an appropriate form through which to convey the systematic haphazardness of coastal thought, the essay presents an alphabet spanning the seas – from Cacophony to Cyclone – that is designed according to a structured syllabary determined by the fortuitous homophonic resonance of the character C.

Taking Turns is an open forumfor brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the
field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite both Nordic and non-Nordic scholars to
present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research.
In this issue, we are handing the baton over to Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the
University of Texas, Arlington, USA. Dr Alaimo’s research interests include nineteenthand
twentieth-century multicultural American literatures; critical theory; feminist theory;
cultural studies, green cultural studies; science studies; environmentalism and feminism;
environmental health, environmental justice, environmental ethics; emerging theories of
materiality in environmental feminism, corporeal feminism, and science studies; science,
literature, and art of sea creatures. Her first book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting
Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), explores the work of North American women
writers, theorists, and activists from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth
century, arguing that “nature” has been a crucial site for a wide range of feminist cultural
interventions. Material Feminisms, edited with Susan J. Hekman (Indiana UP, 2008),
charts emerging models of materiality in feminist theory, bringing together environmental
feminism, corporeal feminism, feminist science studies, and disability studies. Her most
recent book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and theMaterial Self (Indiana UP,
2010), argues that focusing on “trans-corporeality”—the movement across human bodies
and non-human nature—profoundly alters our sense of human subjectivity, environmental
ethics, and the individual’s relation to scientific knowledge. Her next book, Sea Creatures
and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, will explore

This essay proposes the category of the oceanic South. It presents the Southern Hemisphere’s blue expanses as one of its defining features and elaborates from this a framework that brings into agitated contention the extractive economies of the North, the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the South, and other interlocking human and more-than-human itineraries. Tracking a drift into the Southern Ocean in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, the essay takes this “most neglected of oceans” as a vantage point from which to draw the contours of the oceanic South and engage its troubled surfaces and lively depths. Thinking through the roiling and hostile, fecund, and unbounded nature of this ocean, the essay follows “the lives of whales” in novels by Witi Ihimaera and Zakes Mda. Sounding the ocean’s imaginative depths, these fictions offer illuminating ways of thinking the South while maintaining an unsettling planetarity.

This article surveys representations of ocean and coastline in post-apartheid South African narratives, focusing on how they come to articulate a nation in and after transition. It finds that a restored sense of connection in the wake of the exceptional land a-part is one of the notable sea changes of the post-apartheid order as South Africa is re-imagined at the conjunction of Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the neoliberal global order, while various dark tides continue to transport and haunt the post-apartheid imagination. Some narratives plumb the ocean depths in search of metaphors of literariness, conceive of it as housing memory or evoke the littoral to imagine anti-dualist states. Others emphasise the sea as a „material space of nature‟ or suggest it summons ways of knowing that accommodate the mystery abjected and repressed by the enlightenment rationality that docked on South African shores during the long colonial encounter.

This article considers the depiction of the marine world and its mythical inhabitants in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Through an ecocritical reading of the text, whereby I consider Pliny's tendency to conceptualise Nature as a divinity and his consequential displacement of the traditionally anthropomorphic Greco-Roman gods, we can better understand the underlying factors in Pliny's selective inclusion of ideas. I argue that Pliny's divinisation of Nature, attributable to the influence of ancient Stoicism, has impacted his conception of the relationship between humans and Nature, an ideal centred around a post-anthropocentric framework. This, in turn, exerts a ripple effect onto the folkloric elements of the text. Both the anthropic figures of the sea (Nereids and Tritons) along with more bestial creatures (sea monsters) become dispossessed of traditionally divine attributes and associations with Poseidon/Neptune, leading to their representation in the Natural History as more 'naturalised' types of sea creatures.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism: https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2021.1951325

This reflective paper shares considerations of curatorial research of art and water during the current climate crises as part of both contemporary art and Blue Humanities fields. This paper shares water-based methods utilised to develop the Hydrocene, the water-based curatorial theory I have named and defined as an act of curatorial planetary caretaking. In my doctoral thesis, Ingesting the Hydrocene, I argue that water, this most vital of materials, is the central figure of the climate crisis and that a zeitgeist of groundbreaking artists cultivate critical and collaborative methods of relating with water from which we must learn. The Hydrocene as a curatorial theory reveals hitherto unexamined curatorial perspectives on the interrelation of art and water in acts of planetary climate care. The act of naming and defining this artistic tide as the Hydrocene, is a curatorial act of caretaking returning to the epistemological origins of the curator as caretaker. The flow-on effect of the art of the Hydrocene is the potential for more radical ways of relating to water ethically. Sharing the Hydrocene and the complexities of a sustained dedication to learning from and with water in the field of art, this paper aims to illuminate the way water offers intellectual, emotional, physical and metaphorical sustenance to myself and the artists I work with. In return for this wealth of knowledge from water, I aim to recognize waters own agency, power and adaptability, and to enter into principled collaborations with it.

From the book's introduction: "Chapter 7 takes the collection away from land as Dominic O’Key considers W. G. Sebald’s depiction of herring fisheries and fish-eating in Rings of Saturn (1995). To date Sebald has received little attention from animal studies scholars with the dominant critical focus concerning the humanism of Sebald’s project in the face of the holocaust. Rings of Saturn does, however, engage at some length with the North Sea fishing industry. Draw- ing on Adorno’s formulation of “Natural-History”, O’Key explores how Sebald presents nature and history as interlinked in two key scenes: the comic description of the consumption of a particularly bleak plate of fish and chips in Lowestoft and a historical narrative of herring fishery in which he is sharply critical of its ecological harms. Ultimately, for O’Key, Sebald can be seen as a figure who is significantly resistant to fish eating."

Tentative feminist environmental humanities essay on the potentials of low trophic theory and why we need to learn to eat, socialize and think with low trophic species (like kelp, mussles, oysters) and the blue humanities/critical ocean studies.

A vital set of positions are being elaborated through oceanic immersion in response to the rising waters of the blue Anthropocene. Through discussion of a South African novel, Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker, this chapter attends to the “oceanic south” in search of new perspectives on what it means to inhabit an increasingly blue planet and offers inundation as conceptual counterpart to submergence. Rather than evoking the universalized figure of the Anthropos or marking an epochal rupture, the material metaphor of inundation is shown to elicit diffractive readings of the planetary crisis as manufactured by the late capitalist procedures of extraction, consumption and disposal. Administered by containerization, these procedures were initially hammered out during the slave trade and in states of coloniality. Keeping the north afloat while exacerbating the precarity of the south, they underline the need to recast the blue Anthropocene through the oceanic south and to reclaim the metaphor of inundation from its dematerialization in the lifeboat discourses of the north.