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Abstract
This essay probes the methodological contours of an (eco)critical practice centered on seawater as an analytical category. It queries how a focus on seawater as substance implicates the human and the geophysical in a bilateral process of mutual alteration and eventual amalgamation. I propose a “trans-material” ontology articulated around the corrosive power of seawater, through which organic and inorganic matters (in this argument, the disintegrating, submerged bodies of shipwrecked migrants in the Mediterranean and their ecologically ravaged, more-than-human deep-sea environment) commingle. Reading the process of human dissolution under the influence of seawater alongside the alteration of the marine environment that it causes reveals the reciprocal agency of material bodies, be they biotic or non-biotic. Rescripting matter, all matter, in agential terms productively erodes Anthropocentric models at the root of theories of the Anthropocene. By emphasizing human/more-than-human assemblages, the seawater epistemology that I propose delineates an immanent, multi-scalar form of being-in-the world—an ontology of dissolution premised on loss and decomposition that reveals other definitions of the human beyond the dictum of exceptionalism and the destructive acts that are perpetrated in its name.
Notes
1 On volume, see Steinberg and Peters.
2 See also Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke UP, 2010.
3 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35. 2 (2009), pp. 197–222.
4 Alaimo defines transcorporeality as a “conception of the human as that which is always generated through and entangled in differing scales and sorts of biological, technological, economic, social, political, and other systems” (156).
5 Consonant critical paradigms have gained visibility in recent years, among them DeLoughrey’s “critical ocean studies,” Steinberg and Peters’s “wet ontologies,” Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s “seascape epistemology” (Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, Duke UP, 2016) and Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” itself further developed by DeLoughrey and Hessler (Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, MIT Press, 2018). Stefan Helmreich has also focused on the concept of “seawater” in an anthropological perspective, chiefly in its fraught relation to the nature/culture binary. My focus on seawater as corrosive substance complicates these framings by laying emphasis on the dissolutive properties of the conceptual and material aqueous medium and, most important, on the trans-material residual modes of existence that it engenders.
6 I here use the term “situation” in the sense developed by Donna Haraway in her scathing rebuttal of “God’s eye view” epistemes (“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988), pp. 575–599).
7 See Clive Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene So Wrong,” The Anthropocene Review 2.2 (2015), pp. 102–107.
8 See Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia, 1982.
9 In Achille Mbembe’s reverberating words in “Necropolitics”: “the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether)” (21).
10 See Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Polity, 2004.
11 About non-human realms, see DeLoughrey’s work on metallic waste in the Atlantic (“Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity.” PMLA 125.3 (2010), pp. 703–712).
12 See Iain Chambers, “Another Map, another History, another Modernity,” California Italian Studies 1.1 (2010), pp. 1–14.
13 Caribbean writing has proved adept at examining “the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (Benítez Rojo 11). See also Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997.
14 Research in indigenous studies has revealed alternative epistemologies that reclaim this supposedly blank space. See De Loughrey Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literature, U of Hawai’i P, 2007; Ingersoll.
15 Deleuzian conceptions of nomadism capitalize on the symbolic valence of water as a principle of smoothness and becoming against land-based models of social existence: “it is the chaotic movement and reformation of matter, which is seen most clearly in the churnings of the ocean, that both enables and disrupts (or reterritorialises and deterritorialises) earthly striations” (Steinberg and Peter 255). Steinberg, however, warns against the pitfalls of an “over-theorization of ocean space” (“Of other seas” 158), which keeps the focus away from its geophysical materiality.
16 See Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Bloomsbury, 2017.
17 See Epeli Hau’ofa, We are the Ocean: Selected Works. U of Hawai’i P, 2008; DeLoughrey; and Ingersoll. Commenting on Epeli Hau’ofa’s reimagination of the ocean as a “sea of islands” connecting all Pacific Islanders in watery intimacy, Margaret Jolly writes “For him the sea is as much inside the bodies of Islanders as it is their connecting fluid of passage […] the still center of an ocean of experience they navigate” (419). Jolly echoes recent work on indigenous epistemologies. See, for instance, Vincente Diaz (“No Island is an Island,” Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, The U of Arizona P, 2015, pp. 90–108) on the etak technique of navigation in the Pacific or Hessler on stick charts (34–35; 63).
18 I borrow this idea of convergence from Jon Anderson, “Relational places: the surfed wave as assemblage and convergence,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012), pp. 570–587. For an account of surfing experiences of fusion with the oceanic medium, see Ingersoll.
19 Interestingly, Elalamy also delineates hybrid, human-animal multispecies life forms: “her right arm buried in the sand like a shattered wing” (98); “a strange kettle of fish. Fish so big they might have been human, God forbid, they look human, dear God, like people, they are people!” (94).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French and Director of Middle East and North African Studies at Tulane University. A scholar of Maghrebi literature and Mediterranean Studies, she is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (2017) and the co-editor of The Mediterranean Maghreb: Literature and Plurilingualism (2012) and Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (2018). She is currently at work on several projects that examine borders and migration from the standpoint of water as an epistemological site. She is Editor of Expressions maghrébines, the peer-reviewed journal of the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines.