OCEAN - MUD - ROUTES
PANEL 6
OCEAN - MUD - ROUTES
Monday, 4 July 2022
11:45 am - 13:15 pm
Location: ROOM 101A
Panel Speakers
Susanne Ferwerda
Caio Simões de Araújo
Olivia Sheringham & Janetka Platun
Moderated by: Lani Hanna
Blue Oceans & the Color of Colonialism
Susanne Ferwerda
Within the cultural study of oceans there has been an increased prismatic shift toward the colour blue, often articulated as an explicit move away from the largely terrestrial focus of green ecologies and green environmentalism, toward blue aquatic enquiries. But what happens when green becomes blue? Does expanding the colour scheme of environmental theories change the connotations of the colour green with greenwashed marketing campaigns and ‘living sustainably’ but often uncritically neocolonially? Looking at the history of blues, from indigo to ultramarine, from naval uniforms to Aotearoa New Zealand poet Selina Tusitala Marsh’s performance of the poem “Unity” in front of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey in 2016, in this presentation I argue that blue theories need to account for their colonial legacies and present reverberations. Like the imagined treasures waiting in the minds of Europeans at the other end of the ocean, the colour blue has long appealed to the colonial imaginary and drew European ships across the seas to mine blue pigment from Afghan rocks and raise indigo plantations on stolen land, with stolen labour. Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poetry and presence, in the heart of the British empire, visualises the continued resistance against imperial power and the persistent defiance of colonisation in the Pacific region.
Susanne Ferwerda is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and of Dutch heritage. She recently completed a PhD in English at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Blue Ocean Stories, her first book project based on her dissertation, analyzes anticolonial and decolonial narrative disruption to Western colonization in the Oceanic region via long and short fiction, visual and performance art. Her research focuses on the environmental and blue humanities, postcolonial and anticolonial theory, Oceanic (Australia/Pacific) contemporary art and literature, Indigenous studies, feminist new materialisms and animal studies. Themes and areas of particular importance are: the Pacific Ocean, extinction, migration, (de)nuclearization, and extractive (settler) colonial economies.
Muddy Histories & the Temporalities of the Shoreline: A View from Maputo Bay
Caio Simões de Araújo
As the booming literature in oceanic studies suggests, thinking with the ocean demands that we de-center the human and engage with the question of materiality, both organic and inorganic. It also requires that we rethink and broaden our ideas of historical agency beyond the human, to accommodate the roles of randomness, of matter, of climate, of weather, and of geological formations in our historical narratives. Likewise, oceanic histories may require a reimagination of the archive itself, beyond the authority of nation state as a gatekeeper of how we are able to know the past. In this paper, I hope to engage with the question of the ocean as archive from the point of view of my own historical work on the shoreline of Southern Mozambique. I want to engage with the materiality of the shore, with its multiple temporalities and fractal nature, to try to imagine the amphibian history of this region, as it is forever unsettled by its ambiguity as both a terrestrial and oceanic space. I suggest that thinking with the shoreline, doing an oceanic history of the shore, demands that we take its materialities seriously – that we think of matter, of mud, as constitutive of this contact zone between soil and water. But what does such a muddy history look like? What are the archives we can resort to? The paper is divided in three sections: “Terra Viscus: a muddy history of the Maputo Bay”; “Aquatic Racism: viscosity and water play”; and “Queers, Drifters: cruising and ‘cruising’”.
Caio Simões de Araújo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is part of the Regions 2050 Research Collective, headed by Achille Mbembe. Before joining WiSER, he was a researcher at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), of the same university. In collaboration with the Gala Queer Archive, he is currently heading an oral history project titled Archives of the Intimate: Queer Histories of Mozambique, which intends to produce an archive of life histories and queer identities in Mozambique.
Slack Tide: an archival project for (not) knowing
Olivia Sheringham & Janetka Platun
Our intervention reflects on our art/geography collaboration through discussion of Floodgates. This ongoing project focuses on the Thames Barrier, a retractable barrier system designed to prevent the North Sea flooding London which is located in a part of the city steeped in colonial and maritime history. Through the collection and study of found materials on the river's foreshore, alongside research into the area’s social and ecological (hi)stories, Floodgates explores this barrier’s position as both a gateway into the city and out to sea, a borderland - a liminal space of possibility, and a space of exclusion, neglect and decay. We seek to explore new ways of listening to the multifarious (hi)stories of the estuary, whilst at the same time being attentive to what we cannot hear and what we cannot know. This is a work in progress, an open reflection on questions including: How can we show care and curiosity alongside an acceptance of not knowing? How can we attend to that which is left behind, excluded, neglected, without reproducing practices of filtration, othering and a need to 'speak for’?
Olivia Sheringham is a cultural geographer whose research interests and expertise span home, migration and belonging in urban contexts; cultural diversity and geographies of encounter; religion and migration; and creative and collaborative practice. She has worked collaboratively with artists and creative practitioners, including with Janetka through Poiesis.
Janetka Platun’s practice incorporates sculpture, film and installation. Her art is shaped by phenomenological ideas, posing questions about our existential and moral relationship to our surroundings. These reveal deeper meanings of home, belonging and loss. Her work attends to the inter-relational complexities of people, place, time, memory and desire.