Oceans invite us to think together the material, metaphysical, and metaphoric. A cue from the continuous motion of the waters is, an oceanic critical method is an opportunity to engage their plural registers, allowing us to consider that which moves across their surfaces, what dips below the water column, and whom we might encounter deep in the water column. We might say that such plurality makes it possible to trouble normative conceptualizations of space-time — at once inviting critics, writers, artists to think of connectivity and/or simultaneity and yet cautioning us against collapsing into a homogeneous singular. Oceans — and their aquatic kin: the riverine, the tidal, the shoal — in their distinct and shared ways give us ways to observe networks and nodes while reconfiguring our sense of movement, horizontally and vertically. 

With these provocations in mind, this seminar invites papers that take inspiration from how oceanic materialities, metaphysics, and metaphors shape not only our contemporary but its relationship to pasts that have yet to relinquish their hold on us. This seminar welcomes projects that engage literary, visual, media, and print studies as well as ethnography, critical cartographies, oral histories, performance and other embodied methodologies to (re)consider how thinking with the oceanic, or aquatic, shapes our methodological practices. Papers, or creative presentations, that explore comparative approaches to colonialism, slavery, indenture are especially encouraged as well as projects that illuminate lesser attended to cultural and political geographies.