[ecrea] CFP Blue Humanities

CFP Blue Humanities http://www.symploke.org/

*Blue Humanities (Vol. 26, No. 2 [2019])*
Although the ocean covers seventy percent of the planet and provides 
more than half of the oxygen vital to all life on earth it figures 
comparatively little in global cultural production. We tend to treat the 
ocean as that which must be traversed rather than explored for itself — 
we lay beside it at the beach, we cruise on its surface, or more usually 
fly several thousand feet above it, but we don’t enter it (except for 
brief dives), and we certainly don’t dwell in it. Yet the ocean going, 
particularly of cargo from China to the US, underpins globalization, so 
much so it has been described as the ”missing context” of postmodernity 
And from an environmental point of view, the ocean is a repository for 
plastic pollution, waste and effluence and is rapidly dying as global 
temperatures rise. There is a certain kind of politics of invisibility 
at work here — we do not comprehend complex eco-systems of oceans or the 
interdependence of the seas, earth and atmosphere. Much less, do we 
acknowledge the effects of the depletion, erasure and expulsion of 
biological life from much of the world’s oceans. The ocean is, as Allan 
Sekula acknowledged, the ”forgotten space” — in which the twin fissures 
of oceanic degradation and social injustice are colliding. The 
Anthropocene of the ocean is characterized by a particular kind of 
violence characterized by the melting of the Arctic ocean, the mass 
bleaching of coral, industrial extractions of aquatic life and the 
warming of the seas. The cascading effects of these factors and their 
impact upon the Earth’s life support system have yet to be understood — 
but the appearance of dead zones in numerous areas of the world’s oceans 
are a shocking sign of its literal death. There is a growing body of 
work known as the ”blue humanities” which is historicizing the ocean and 
making it part of contemporary consciousness in a way — one hopes —that 
will help environmental activism’s bid to ”save” the ocean. Yet, what 
defines the ”blue humanities”? How does it leverage transdisciplinary 
inquiry and why do we need the blue humanities now?
(Deadline for submissions: 1 August 2018.)

*Manuscripts must be received by August 1, 2018. *

Professor Ian Buchanan

University of Wollongong

Wollongong NSW 2522

Australia

(ibuchana /at/ uow.edu.au) <mailto:(ibuchana /at/ uow.edu.au)>


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