The Sea as Archive: Oceanic Perspectives from Global South Islands

Harvard FAS

This course proposes to shift our perspective from land to sea and to read the latter instead as archive and as history-making site. We will consider the ocean as an inventory of colonial and neocolonial fictions as well as a repository for histories of migratory fluxes (forced and coerced, i.e. slavery, indenture, blackbirding, current migrant crises), militarization and nuclearizaton, and climate crises. We will also explore the ocean’s potential for liberatory aesthetics and decolonial…