The Blue Humanities

One could almost be forgiven for thinking of the ocean as timeless, or empty – aqua nullius. National borders often stop at the shoreline, which means that national histories rarely engage ocean spaces. Even in the case of countries with long-established stakes in transoceanic trade or fishing, the ocean is too often understood as a mere trade route, or resource, rather than a space whose materiality and history is worthy of scholarship in and of itself. All this is on the verge of changing. As Elizabeth Deloughrey writes, “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 into theorizing oceanic submersion” (32). Before going deeper, however, it is important to acknowledge two traditions that laid the groundwork for much blue, or oceanic, scholarship: geopolitics, and globalization and diaspora studies.

Politics cannot be divorced from geography, that much is obvious from Philip Steinberg and Berit Kristoffersen’s discussion of two recent maps, one Canadian and one Norwegian, in which the artic ice edge has been moved 200km southwards, and 70km northwards respectively. Whereas the Norwegian map conveniently clears up the Southeast Barents Sea for oil development, Canada benefits from presenting their northern waters as ice-covered, and dangerous to traverse, because otherwise they would have to open up the Northwest Passage to international shipping according to UN legislation. However, Steinberg and Kristoffersen point out that in order for the ice edge to become a discernable line which can moved to suit national interest, it has to be constructed as such. Generally, this process of abstraction goes against the more informed understanding of environmental scientists, who argue that the ice edge “is mapped … only because it serves as an indicator of the approximate location of water temperatures associated with the polar front, which is in turn associated with higher biological productivity” (i.e. it is where algae and plankton grow and where marine life flourishes), and that it really ought to be understood as an amorphous zone (632). The abstraction of the ice edge as a line also flies in the face of indigenous people for whom the sea ice is an environment crucial to their way of life and not a mere demarcation on a map.

As much as the ocean is a wellspring of life – the original one – it can also be understood as an archive of the dead, subject to its own strange submarine temporalities. The ocean compresses time and defies linear thinking. It is home to countless of species that don’t seem to have evolved much beyond their primitive ancestors, which means they can be perceived as living fossils. Death goes hand in hand with life. This is at the heart of ecology, and I can think of no better demonstration than a particular deep-sea event scientists know very little about: so-called ‘whale falls.’ When a whale carcass sinks to the deep ocean floor, it decomposes much more slowly then it would in the shallows, forming an extremely localized, biologically diverse feeding site for a host of rarely sighted species. Sleeper sharks for example, which are some of the oldest known living vertebrates (the Greenland shark’s slow metabolism grants it a lifespan of up to 500 years). 

Moreover, the ocean floor is littered with shipwrecks, and the bodies of the drowned, like the corpses of enslaved people who jumped, or were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. “[I]n the Caribbean the enormity of the transoceanic history of slavery and indenture has created an aesthetics that imaginatively populates the sea in an act of regional historiography and ancestral memory” (Deloughrey 35). Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures (see photo) can very much be read in this tradition. He sinks textured, PH-neutral concrete casts of real people to the bottom of the ocean floor, where in time, they will be colonized by marine life to become artificial reefs. Once these complex ecological assemblages have settled in, the cast’s gender and ethnicity becomes unrecognizable. These sculptures can thus also be read along afrofuturist lines, memorializing historical events, while at the same time gesturing at strange, multispecies futures. Thereby adding to the past what the future might hold. 

Inspired by the ocean's narrative-defying powers of connection and assemblage, we spent the final minutes of the session practicing some "Blackout Poetry" using (recycling) Mandy Bloomfield's "a Poetics of Ocean Plastics" as raw material. Here is some of the poetry we found:

From p. 517 words and phrases final found through polluted present. conclusion. image of waste, continues the invisible future, his fear performs new kinds of now above the voids, plastic reminder of industrial cruelty. However, her poem, works. In contexts.

From p. 502-503 Images transform into objects Throw away the figures Forms will be our lasting legacy To memorialize the history of the world Demand that this process be understood

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Bloomfield, Mandy. "Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics." Configurations, vol. 27, no. 4, 2019, pp. 501-523. 

Deloughrey, Elizabeth. "Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene" Comparative Literature, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32-44.

Steinberg, Philip, and Berit Kristoffersen. "'The Ice Edge is Lost ... Nature Moved it': Mapping Ice as State Practice in the Canadian and Norwegian North." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 42, no. 4, 2017, pp. 625-641.  

Photo: Jason deCaires Tayler: https://www.underwatersculpture.com/