Storytelling European early modern maritime imaginaries through decolonial theory

Saoirse Ivory

This essay reflects on the relationship between oceans and human(ist) practices of representation. The first part stories the gradual transformation of oceans in early modern European imaginaries from a space of unknowable liminality to a knowable, controllable surface for the transit of peoples, ‘resources’ and capital. Scientific representations of ‘nature’ were (and continue to be) essential to the development and maintenance of cosmologies of exceptionalism and the ‘coloniality of being’. The second part considers how practices of scholarly representation (of ‘nature’, of ‘world’) largely remain wedded to an underlying desire to control the disparate, unruly relatings that make up life. I draw on Aimé Césaire to suggest that the production of transcendental ways of knowing in the Western episteme facilitates the denial of immanent life/death. Going further, I imagine oceans as a paradigm of the recalcitrance of the ‘natural’ as that which escapes the grasp of individual subjective knowledge (including that part of ourselves which is unthinkable yet very much alive). Finally, I consider how oceans – as a force that both launched the colonial imaginary and that now challenges it as the sea rises – can induce modes of representation attuned to affective entanglement, as opposed to those that enact separation, mastery and control. I offer an account of storytelling as a form of decolonial representational praxis that can accommodate the unruliness of oceans, with vignettes from my own fieldwork. Oceans call us back to our humble origins, reminding us of visceral ways of knowing and creating.

Saiorse Ivory is a research MA student in International Relations at the University of Groningen, specializing in environmental politics. Ivory’s core interest is in investigating how the increasingly unpredictable material dynamics of Mother Earth are shaking the foundations of the Western metaphysical imaginary. Ivory’s most recent project, ‘The micropolitics of sea level rise in the Netherlands’, challenged the abstraction of the ocean enacted by bodies such as the IPCC, through several days of affect-based fieldwork in Zeeland, and the production of two texts. Ivory has completed a four-month research internship on the representations of oceans on 16th C. European maps and globes and completed an BA in Journalism in Dublin in 2014

Choreosonic Resistance aboard Middelburgs Welvaren

Britt van Duijvenvoorde

In my paper, I attend to a slave revolt and the subsequent massacre of the enslaved aboard Middelburgs Welvaren. My meditation anchors on how, in the archived witness testimony by the white crew, a logic of freedom and unfreedom is spelled out that simultaneously holds that “the enslaved always strive for their freedom” and that their resistance is “the realization of their godless intention.” Conversely, only the Europeans aboard were regarded as acting in terms of ‘self-defense.’ To unwrap this strained narrative, I take recourse to Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the descriptive statement of the human and Man’s overrepresentation thereof. On this analysis, the violated black enslaved could not be killed, because they were never deemed in possession of a life; othered into fungible beings, they had no ‘self’ to defend in the first place. Still, to transcend the rehearsal of historical violence, one needs to approach the enslaved on their own terms. Thus, I content that, enclosed in a world whose constitution requires black death, black life signifies a constant rebellion. As such, the coloniality of freedom by the crew is contested from the very first; the enslaved enacted a form of freedom that is beyond and undoes the freedom/unfreedom binary. Breaking through the bulkheads – the very structure of their prison – and using the tools in their torturous environment as weapons, they performed an otherwise imagination in the restricted world around them. Escaping while collectively yelling “hurray!”, the enslaved became a collective body, using vocalization as an act of self-extension capable of attaining space. As such, their choreosonic revolt was a collective act of world-creation.

Britt van Duijvenvoorde is a white scholar, preferring the pronouns ‘she’ or ‘they’. Currently, they are engaged in a Research Master Philosophy (Ethics) at Radboud University and in a regular Masters in History (Colonial and Global History) at Leiden University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of disability and mad studies, gender, queer, and feminist studies, and black, subaltern, and indigenous studies. Forever haunted by the questions of how to witness, refuse, redress, and (re)create, Duijvenvoorde studies new linguistic/artistic fields that abolish existing oppressive structures by aiming at a beyond based on currently existing otherwise forms of living.