Oceanic Turns

Keywords: ocean, social theory, materiality, fluidity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

For the past two decades, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities have increasingly referred to an ‘oceanic turn’ – drawing also on much longer efforts to embrace the ocean for thinking, literally, against the ‘grain’ (or ground) and the normative assumptions about society and space it generates. In such work, a focus on the oceanic is used to destabilise, re-vision and reform established territories, categories and understandings, upend master narratives and challenge dominant western spatial tropes, and their very real ramifications.

However, whilst there is a general agreement that a turn to the oceanic can disrupt terracentric ways of thinking, once one digs deeper it becomes evident that the ‘oceanic turn’ is not singular. There appear to be multiple ‘turns’ at work, and they are not always ‘turning’ in the same direction. Turns are being made with reference to quite different bodies of literature (e.g. post-humanist feminism, Caribbean archipelagic philosophy, Marxist historical political economy, post-structural cultural geography) in order to achieve a variety of ends (e.g. understanding the workings of empire, decolonising associations of race and place, interpreting cultural meanings of water). The turns themselves link up with, and draw from, diverse disciplinary traditions (ecocritical literary theory, world-systems theory, new materialism).

This paper considers the breadth of oceanic turns being taken and interrogates whether there is room for dialogue between them. Crucially, it asks whether whether a fusion of these turns is desirable, or even feasible, given the diverse flourishing of ocean-inspired perspectives.