The title of our panel is inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs's injunction to learn from marine mammals’ ways of being and knowing that are antithetical to those of gendered racial capitalism (Undrowned), ways that may save us from the toxic air of modernity that we breathe. We look not to other species but to migrants who live in the wake of modernity, people carrying oceanic sensibility, identity, and ways of knowing into terrestrial, often urban environments. Dionne Brand writes of crossing through the "door of no return” and survival after the Middle Passage; we ask what that crossing means when one attempts to land.  We invite scholars to engage with how this crossing — from ocean space to land — shapes day-to-day migrant life, framing migration as an irreversible oceanic passage. The conversation is in part shaped by an earlier seminar that framed literature in terms of transit and transaction, and flagged sea crossings as key spaces of transit. We would like to consider how texts of crossing from sea to land raise questions about oceanic epistemology, diasporic subjectivity, and the crossing as formative event. while broad enough to invite papers from Black Atlantic studies, Black Mediterranean Studies, South Asian indenture scholarship, urban studies, and comparative migration literature, among other streams. The idea that oceanic structure, flow, and language resurface in city life is one idea we would like to explore in the seminar. Crossing — including transgression — is a thematic throughline we would like to develop in the seminar. It connects the literal (sea crossing, migration) to the figurative (boundary violation, social transgression),and we hope opens the seminar to a wide range of literary and theoretical approaches.

Some threads:
Ocean as borderless space — the ocean's lack of fixed borders offers something to explore in contrast with the hard borders migrants encounter on land. In what ways are oceans being violently bordered and policed through imperial and settler-colonial logics? Alternatively, how do migrants’ experiences with the ocean shape their negotiations with borders or bordered violence on land? How do oceanic epistemologies and land epistemologies meet for those who undertaken crossing?

Ocean as life force — in texts such as Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, water is used as a life-giving force; water permeates the framing of characters and their conditions. How do migrants’ fluid experiences (as global as ocean journeys, river crossings, or as personal as sweating, thirst, floating) vitalize their day-to-day life?

Oceanic language — Brand's use of water metaphors to describe characters (e.g., Elizete describing Verlia in In Another Place, Not Here) suggests the ocean functions as both literal and figurative presence in diasporic subjectivity. How might a migrant oceanic sensibility shape urban experience?