Oceans as Archives

In Oceans as Archives, the ocean forms a generative site to develop practices of reading, writing, thinking, and imagining a long era of climate catastrophe. Many scholars, artists, and activists have argued that climate catastrophe demands new methods of writing, representation, and critique that attend to the violences and erasures of the past and create new possibilities for a collective future. Indigenous, Black, and (formerly) colonized peoples have centered oceans as sites of contest and connection, spaces of subversion, multispecies entanglement, ancestral knowledge, and as sources of life.

Including short and long essays, poems, and creative interventions, this volume centres oceans as archives to expand engagements with ocean justice from non-Eurocentric critical lineages characteristic of the racial capitalocene. It speaks to questions of oceanic past-present-futures from an array of ocean regions, (inter)disciplinary fields, his/her/theirstories, surfaces and depths. This scholarship – in all its multiplicity – forms a compass, a guide, a critical reminder that there have always been ways to think with the ocean beyond European cartography, extraction, capitalism, and colonization. Oceans as Archives will be essential reading for those interested in Critical Ocean Studies, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociolegal Studies, Geography, and Oceanography.

Author Biography

Kristie Patricia Flannery is a historian of colonialism and its legacies, particularly in the lands and oceans that the global Spanish empire once claimed to rule. Her book Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World was published with Penn Press in 2024. She is a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University.

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair, Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022-2025 she is a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (2009) and Across Oceans of Law (2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020).

Mikki Stelder grew up along the Zaan River at the mouth of the North Sea. They are Assistant Professor of Global Arts and Politics at the University of Amsterdam and a Marie Skłodowska Curie Recipient. Their publications include, “A Sinking Empire” (Angelaki: journal for the theoretical humanities) and “The colonial difference in Hugo Grotius: rational man, slavery, and Indigenous dispossession” (Postcolonial Studies), which received the ASCA Article of the Year Award (2022). Stelder co-edits the Gloria Wekker Reader. The video essay that accompanies their text for Oceans as Archives was part of the group exhibition Unimaginable: Clarion Calls for Rising Seas.