Key texts: "Oceanic Thinking"

Oceanic Thinking tells multiple, complicating stories about the ocean, and its transdisciplinary reach opens multiple possibilities for engaging students through their degrees.

The following texts have informed the thinking behind the exhibition and the Blue Assembly project of which it is a part. These texts can be included in courses as required readings. Access copies of these texts or see below for further details.

Chandler, Mielle and Astrida Neimanis. “Water and Gestationality: What Flows Beneath Ethics.” In Thinking with Water, 61-83. Montreal; Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013.

Key words: Hydro-feminism; ethics; the maternal; more-than-human.

In this chapter Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis argue for an understanding of water as subtending ethics, as the material and symbolic/social conditions that make ethics possible. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Emmanual Levinas’s theorisation of maternity, Chandler and Neimanis present water as a facilitative (rather than active) framework for thinking ethics, expanding the concept of gestationally (as a facilitative ethics) to the more-than-human. They make the case that the material qualities of water—its responsiveness and plurality in and beyond the human—models a form of sociality that “dissolves” the idea of a unitary, autonomous self in favour of an open responsiveness.

Glissant, Édouard. “Open Boat” and “Errantry, Exile.” In Poetics of Relations, 5-22. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990;1997.

Key words: relational; identity; the Middle Passage; nomadism; roots; rhizome.

In “Open Boat,” the first section of Poetics of Relation, Glissant positions the abyss – the slave boat as abyss, the ocean as abyss, and the abyss of lost homelands behind, and unknown lands ahead – as a kind of beginning, the shared relation to which engendered a new people and knowledge. In “Errantry, Exile,” he sets out a schema for identity based on relations, with a particular attentiveness to kinds of identity generated through different forms of “nomadism.” He distinguishes between Western, colonial, invading (“arrowlike”) nomadism and the idea of errantry. The first arrests 3 University of Queensland Art Museum movement in the establishment of nations, setting down roots which both consolidate and expropriate the form of identity that the nation encodes. According to Glissant, this is a totalising, dualistic means of engendering identity. Against this, he offers errantry. For the errant, roots are rhizomatic (a concept he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari) - they still signify rootedness, but this is an open, mobile, multiple form of relational connectedness as identity.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no.1 (Spring 1994):147-161

Key words: Oceania; economics; borders; diaspora.

An important text in Pacific Studies, Hau’ofa argues against the view perpetrated in a number of (largely Western) discourses, that the countries in Oceania are too small and resource-poor for economic prosperity and independence. He describes how different institutions have imposed artificial, deterministic borders on a region that has been historically open, fluid, vast and selfsustaining. Hau’ofa offers an expansive reimagining of Oceania to include the generative economic practices of the diaspora, who remain connected to their homelands through their kinship systems and send goods and funds home. Islanders who remain living in Oceania reciprocate in ways material, environmental, communal and cultural.

Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham, Duke University Press. 2020, 1-33.

Key words: media studies; conceptual displacement; terrestrial bias; embodied epistemologies.

In this introduction, Melody Jue establishes “thinking through seawater” as a methodology of disruption in the field of media studies. She positions the ocean not (only) as the object of study, but as a specific milieu through which to develop a “conceptual displacement” that defamiliarises assumptions, structures, and meanings informed by our terrestrial conditions. Jue conceives of the ocean in relation to embodied epistemologies, as that which can dislodge normative ways of thinking habituated through our relationships to the ground, air, gravity – relationships usually uncognised. Important to Jue’s methodology is this comparative mode, in which the ocean is set in dialogue with terrestrial forms of knowledge and interpretation.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Capitalism.” e-flux journal, 112, October 2020.

Key words: late liberalism; anti-colonisation; race theory; ancestral time; Country; subjectivity. In this essay Povinelli argues for an understanding of key critical concerns/ concepts (“axioms”) arising from the anti-colonial struggle in relation to late liberalism, which has sought to “blunt” them. Central to her argument is the idea of specificity, developed through recourse to anti-colonial and race theory in relation to the Black Atlantic. Povinelli argues that the homogenising logic of late liberalism co-opts the specific social circumstances (and experiences) of certain groups, either denying them or repacking them as universals. Through her work with the Karrabing indigenous film collective, Povinelli makes the case for recognising, without co-opting, the specificities of difference. She positions the Karrabing idea of the ancestral present as a case study, elucidating ideas of Country, time (ancestral past and present) and self as otherwise to Western conceptions. She unfolds a number of key points. The first is that the imposition of Western notions of land ownership as means for settling native title is a perversion of a far more complex, communal, and ontological relation with the land. The second is that a progressive notion of time is ill adept at accounting for the continual present of ancestry. And the third (linked to both previous) is a challenge to the notion of the self as a "sovereign body", utterly autonomous and self-determining. Language is important to this understanding of a far more connective, even shared structure of subjectivity.

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Teawia, Teresia. “Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism and the ‘Polynesian’ Body.” In Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, 249-263. Edited by Vilsoni He

Key words: colonial militarism; tourism; militourist; “Polynesian”/Pacific bodies.

This article is a comparative reading of Gauguin’s Noa Noa and Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends with close attention to the construction of the of the “Polynesian” body as a form made available for appropriation by militourist powers. Teawia proposes the term militourist to capture the intricately connected structures of colonial militarism and tourism in the Pacific. For Teawia, Gauguin constructs an idealised, homogenised Polynesian body that dispels the diversity of peoples living in the Pacific Islands, at the same time as instituting a hierarchy of Pacific bodies (with the fantasy of the Polynesian body valued above other Pacific bodies). Against Gauguin, Teawia argues that Hau’ofa (humorously) naturalises the body without eroticising it—a treatment that defies homogenisation and resists militourist appropriation. She also argues that while Nederends centres male characters, a strategic “reading in the margins” opens up feminist comprehensions of the “Polynesian” body.

McClintock, Anne. “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice.” e:flux Architecture: Oceans in Transformation, June 2020

Key words: refugees; militarisation; climate crisis.

In this essay, McClintock braids together some of the major issues of our time: "climate chaos, global militarisation, and the mass displacement of people and other species." The essay is structured as a fugue, a musical form vested with multiplicity, but the idea of a fugue state is also implicit: a forgetting that separates us from our past, and prevents us from learning from it. Place is an important figure in McClintock’s thinking, positioning global political and environmental concerns in specific sites: mass displacement is told from a men’s clothing store in Turkey which sell business suits and life jackets; Glacial melt is seen from the air above Greenland; rising sea waters flood the ancestral homelands of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe off the coat of Louisiana. Her cataloguing of disaster in all its guises and stages has a kind of crescendoing effect, communicating the urgency of these multiple global crises.

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