The Oceans

Abstract

The oceanic turn offers an elaboration of and corrective to various theories of world literature. Oceans constitute the inaugural global space and chime with models of world literature as a circulatory system, but they also trouble such definitions with apprehension of unfathomable depths. Readings that track the southern-going ships of imperial and global expansion and extraction register the production of the world-system without re-centring the Euro-Atlantic literary marketplace. Rather than locating the postcolonial or the indigenous as peripheral or exotic, they attend to literatures immersed in zones of interfusion and which harbour world- making practices of connection, cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Oceanic literatures are also uniquely situated to move between the scales of the local and the planetary and are alive to multispecies relations in ways that expand and thicken conceptions of the world.