The shipwreck and the region

Keywords: oceans, new materialism, shipwrecks, region, postcolonialism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

‘Oceanic turns’ in geography and cognate disciplines have invited a reimagining of spatial dynamics, influenced by renewed concepts of depth, flow, turbulence, circulation, drift, and more. This paper examines puts these conceptual developments into conversation with contemporary debates on regionalisation. While ‘regional geography,’ with its conventional emphasis on description and classification, began to go out of style in the 1990s, there is renewed interest in postcolonial scholarship for conceptualising processes of regionalisation in the 21st century. Here, regionalisation is considered as a process, whereby a focus on institutions, governments, and markets can miss undercurrents of informal interaction, clandestine movement, and bottom-up exchange. I examine recent turns toward ocean-centric concepts of the region (e.g. the Black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean region etc) for what they can tell us about spatial dynamics that might underpin new regionalisms and bring new life to regional geographies. At the same time, I suggest these new regionalisations might be enriched by more careful attention to particular marine processes. I propose the figure of the shipwreck to draw attention to complex ecologies of speed and slowness, relationships between ontologies of land and sea, and palimpsestic yet transformed matters of history. These points of emphasis might both reinvigorate and trouble ideas of the region and regionalisation.