In Oceans as Archives, the ocean forms a generative site to develop practices of reading, writing, thinking, and imagining a long era of climate catastrophe. Many scholars, artists, and activists have argued that climate catastrophe demands new methods of writing, representation, and critique that attend to the violences and erasures of the past and create new possibilities for a collective future. Indigenous, Black, and (formerly) colonized peoples have centered oceans as sites of contest and connection, spaces of subversion, multispecies entanglement, ancestral knowledge, and as sources of life. Including short and long essays, poems, and creative interventions, this volume centers oceans as archives to expand engagements with ocean justice from non-Eurocentric critical lineages characteristic of the racial capitalocene. It speaks to questions of oceanic past-present-futures from an array of ocean regions, (inter)disciplinary fields, his/her/their stories, surfaces and depths. This scholarship—in all its multiplicity—forms a compass, a guide, a critical reminder that there have always been ways to think with the ocean beyond European cartography, extraction, capitalism, and colonization. Oceans as Archives will be essential reading for those interested in critical ocean studies, environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, Black studies, cultural studies, sociolegal studies, geography, and oceanography.
