About

The focus of my project addresses how oceans and oceanic nonhuman bodies are represented 21st century science fiction, considering how these stories present ways of thinking about the ocean in the time of the Anthropocene. I contend with Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s identification of a new oceanic imaginary, in which she argues that the oceans are becoming identified through their agency, materiality, nonhuman subjectivity and alternative spatio-temporalities. Thinking through oceanic representations through eco-queer and posthuman lenses, I argue that oceanic SF estranges and calls into question the onto-epistemological boundaries of ‘the human’, and is able to make-visible the diverse more-than-human world that make up the materiality of our planet. These explorations are informed by the critical intersections of the blue humanities, ecocriticism and new materialism by feminist writing by Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and Astrida Neimanis, whose works facilitate an understanding of human-oceanic material interdependencies, and the deep effects of human histories of colonialism and hetero-patriarchy on our environments.

In critically analysing the oceanic imaginaries of three works of contemporary SF - Rita Indiana's Tentacle, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Alexis Pauline Gumbs' M Archive - I argue SF literature challenges dominant anthropocentric ideologies about the ocean, through the disorientating modalities of queer hybridity and spatial-temporal alterity. These ‘blue posthumanist’ imaginaries provide generative alternatives for navigating our relationship to the aquatic nonhuman, and help us stay with the trouble of oceanic ecological damage.