LIFE AQUATIC: WATER CULTURES AND BLUE HUMANITIES

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

Material and Metaphor. Destruction, Purification, Gestation. Hydrogen Hydroxide. Formless Chaos, Lifegiving Force. With what words, methods, and infrastructures do humans attempt to describe and contain water? How do the physical properties, geographies, and movements of water shape the (non)human social and sublime? In thinking together with scholars of gender fluidity, the Black Atlantic, chaotic feminine, flooding cities, cathartic oceans, (anti)colonial territory, plastic islands, and liquid capital, this course will provide students with a solid grounding in the shifting tides of the Blue Humanities—sometimes called “critical ocean studies.” While seawater flows throughout the texts and topics of the semester, the course is equally interested in those waters that trickle outside the boundaries of the bodies named Ocean. This course wades between the porous and co-constitutive borders of human bodies, bodies of water, and the body politic.