Decolonizing ocean spaces: Saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities

Abstract

Oceans in the colonial Anthropocene are haunted by the brutal racial logics of slavery, indenture, plunder, violence, death, and multispecies extinction. This brutality manifested through uneven burdens of climate extremes, global warming, ocean acidification, sea level rise, pollution, and threats from offshore energy extraction, chokes the “life force” of oceans that sustain planetary belongings and futures. Global agreements on climate change, biodiversity conventions, sustainable goals, and laws of the sea increasingly attempt to transform dystopic planetary futures through openness to Indigenous and local knowledges. But these overlooked Indigenous, Black, Brown, and southern intellectual traditions of belonging and responsibility in settler colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid societies have always existed alongside white, western Euro-American ontologies of the ocean. As subaltern southern and Indigenous scholars, our privileging of ontologies of the ocean amid the racial, colonial, and capitalist logics that continues to suffocate people and the planet, seeks to do more than enrich white, western, English-speaking Euro-American institutions. We, therefore, face ethical dilemmas as we assemble and prioritize strands of literature in our decolonial, polyphonic place-based ocean storytelling that seeks to advance new directions in Environmental Geography.