Paper short abstract:

Through the agency of a deep-sea creature, a brittlestar, this conference paper discusses watery colonial legacies and mindsets in Western museums. Within the framework of blue humanities and decolonial feminisms the paper explores possibilities to re-imagine more-than-human futures.

Paper long abstract:

Through the history of culture the ocean has been represented as a nonhuman, uninhabitable place, threatening and filled with unknown forces. Sea trade, battles, and wreckage at the surface of the water represents stories of heroic and human-centered endeavors. Such colonial legacies and mindsets are still present in many museum institutions in Europe (Haq 2015). To contribute to a watery discussion on how to resist the reproduction of colonial taxonomies in museums I will in this conference paper turn to the underwater world and think through the visions and materialities of a deep-sea critter: a brittlestar. The narrator of this story was collected by a naturalist in the waters of S:t Barthélemy in the 1800s and transferred to Gothenburg Natural History Museum as part of Sweden’s colonial project.

Feminist philosopher Karen Barad has previously described how the multi-limbed brittlestar can offer an opportunity to rethink the nature of relationships. Due to their specific skeletal system that also functions as a visual system Barad calls them “trans/materialities” which means they transgress divides such as organic and inorganic, machine and animal, macro and micro (Barad 2014). Learning from the brittlestar through the lens of blue humanities I approach the political ontologies of the sea (Alaimo 2019). In this mode I travel with the currents from the Atlantic Ocean and to the Bohus Sea where the brittlestar becomes the more-than-human agent to unpack an abysmal part of Swedish history at the same time as it opens for possibilities to re-imagine more-than-human-futures.