This article takes a world-ecological approach to regional depictions of Atlantic coastal communities, analysing a widescale cultural engagement with regimes of fish and oil extraction. In Part I, I focus on Irish filmmaker Risteard O'Domhnaill's 2010 documentary,The Pipe, which depicts the battle of a coastal Irish community against a gas pipeline project, and his next major production, Atlantic (2016), a comparative documentary of fishing and fossil-fuel industries in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Norway. While The Pipe opens up the debate around energy, environmental futurity, and state violence, a world-ecological lens reveals how Atlantic normalizes a nationalist, capitalist attitude to oil extraction that contradicts both films' professed desires for sustainable fisheries and stable ecologies. In Part II, I turn to a cluster of three novels which also depict the interconnections between fishing and oil industries in different geographic settings along the Atlantic: Solar Bones (2016) by Irish author Mike McCormack, February (2010) by Canadian author Lisa Moore, and Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. I outline how the oceanic aesthetics and narratives of these texts reveal and denaturalize the masculinist and capitalist epistemologies that drive ecological regimes of fish and oil extractivism over the longuedurée. The article ultimately argues that a multidisciplinary and multiform approach enables a wider comprehension of the cultural and ecological challenges facing the Atlantic today.
This editorial introduces the special issue, ‘World Literature and the Blue Humanities’. The authors articulate the commonalities and tensions between world literature, world-ecology, blue humanities, and hydrocultural approaches. Taking megadams, water pollution, and the blue revolution as baselines, we offer short analyses of works by Namwali Serpell, Craig Santos Perez, Jean Arasanayagam, Paul Greengrass, Will Menmuir, and Emily St. John Mandel in order to articulate how culture can both contest and normalize water enclosure. The piece ends with a brief summary of the contributions to the special issue.
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