Short Abstract

Grounded in the field of Blue Humanities, the term “offshore dissent” defines a methodology predicated upon the entanglement of politics with ecology in which acts of insubordination are performed in the sea and sanctioned by the sea.

Long Abstract

In Bodies of Water (2017), Astrida Neimanis puts forward an aquatic conceptualization of corporealities founded in phenomenology and feminism which combines eloquently scientific knowledge with artistic narrations in an attempt to access, amplify and describe an embodied politics of location. As a meaningful source of knowledge production, literary narrations forged within the aquatic imaginaries of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic and Caribbean reveal a grammar of dissent in which acts of epistemic disobedience put forward a new agenda in the search for knowledge. Predicated upon the entanglement of politics with ecology, the consistent performance of “offshore dissent” deployed in Indo-Atlantic-Caribbean texts allows us to access, amplify and describe a thalasscentric -in contraposition with colonial, terracentric- epistemology wherein acts of empowerment are concomitant with the inclusion of non-human actants as fully-fledged narrative agents.

In this panel, we aim to delineate a genealogy of offshore dissent in Indo-Atlantic-Caribbean literary texts and demonstrate how offshore dissent is articulated as a sea-based counternarrative that exhumes the racialized bodies that were discarded in the formation of the colonial archive. Performances of offshore dissent can range from overt rebellions (e.g. slave revolts, mutinies) to more subdued forms of non-compliance whereby colonial nomoi are identified and rejected. Drawing on Neimanis’s evolution stories, we claim that the African continent functions as the beacon that guides an Indo-Atlantic-Caribbean corpus of offshore dissent that directly impinges on the conception of an archive-based epistemology.

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