Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Philip Steinberg, Durham University

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Description:

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 the ocean has had this capacity, this ‘oceanic turn’ is not singular. There appear to be multiple ‘turns’ at work, and they are not always ‘turning’ in the same direction. For instance, scholarship associated with the ‘oceanic turn’ includes work that:
• Draws from the relational ontologies of coastal and archipelagic people (particularly in the Caribbean and Oceania) to decentre linked notions of place, race, conquest, and settlement;
• Takes poststructural and other relational ontologies (e.g. ANT, Assemblage) to move away from sealed geographical units to show connections between land and sea beyond fixed spatial categories, and to highlight the fluidity of societies, cultures, economies, and politics;
• Explores the histories and solidarities of trans-oceanic peoples (diasporas, refugees) and the emergence of subaltern identities to reconsider ideas of nation and ethnicity and their connection to place;
• Builds on a linked understanding of human and geophysical mobilities to consider the ocean as a space of betweenness and becoming, and that uses this to reconsider the role of place and movement in social lives;
• Focuses on the ways in which humans and other species intermingle in more-than-human aquatic space, using this oceanic intermingling to critique the ‘human’ as an analytic subject that exists ontologically prior to its environment and distinct from other species.

This diversity of work suggests that what is often referred to as a singular ‘oceanic turn’ is in fact several turns that are taken with reference to oftentimes quite different literatures (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 the cultural meaning of water).

This five-part session addresses these oceanic turns and critically explores the efficacy and outcomes of various frames of oceanic thinking.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda