Black and Blue and Turbulent: The Blue Humanities and Critical Race Theory

Keywords: blue humanities, oceans, Critical Race Theory
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

The long histories of the African Diaspora and maritime globalization cross and entwine in many ways, but contemporary scholarship in the blue humanities and Critical Race Theory tend to flow in separate currents. Blue eco-thinking, perhaps because of its roots in maritime history and histories of globalization, has a tendency to efface the contributions of Black histories and Black scholarship. Critical Race Theory, driven by its urgent political commitments, also tends to develop along different lines than the eco-theoretical speculations of the blue humanities. In twenty-first-century global Anglophone contexts, also, access to blue spaces and practices tends to divide itself along racial lines. Histories of swimming and sailing, in this context, tend to center white people. Nevertheless, the central insights of the blue humanities, including the fundamental ambivalence human cultures express toward the watery element that is both life-giving and often destructive, resonates with the perspectives offered by Critical Race Theorists. Major theoretical modes such as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Éduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation speak to both Black and Blue paradigms. In seeking key areas of overlap and friction between Black and Blue studies, this talk draws on a series of historical and literary texts, including a lyric fragment from Emily Dickinson and a short excerpt from Moby-Dick. I also draw together criticism by Gilroy, Glissant, Kevin Dawson, Christina Sharpe, John Gillis, Helen Rozwadowski, Dionne Brand, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Philip Hoare.