Postcolonial Fiction, Oceans, and Seas
Authors: Rajbhandari Kritish 
Published: July 2022

While Pan-Africanist and Pan-Asianist movements from the early to mid-20th century sought transnational alliances against Western imperialism, anti-colonial nationalisms during the late 20th century emphasized national independence and sovereignty and forged notions of culture and identity based on land and territorial belonging. Hence, the territorial nation as the primary site of anti-colonial struggle emerged as the dominant scale of critique within the field of postcolonial literary studies. However, the transnational turn in the humanities has also brought into focus aspects of postcolonial fiction that look beyond colonial and national boundaries. Postcolonial writers and critics have turned to the ocean and the seas for alternative spatialization to challenge land-based methodologies overdetermined by nationalist and area-studies paradigms. Scholars have theorized different spatial scales for ocean-based criticisms drawn from geographical, historical, and cultural contexts.

In all three of the world’s major oceans, the sea has been a site of imperial interpellation as well as a traumatic passage into slavery, servitude, and exile. Scholars of the Black Atlantic have contributed oceanic frameworks that center the sea and the ship as the locus for Afro-diasporic experiences, whether as a fluid foundation for a transnational community, as a site of collective memory, or as an abyss of the Middle Passage that continues to structure Black lives globally. Writers from the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions have similarly sought to recuperate alternative maritime histories and indigenous epistemologies that contest the narratives of the ocean as an empty space claimed by Western imperialisms and globalization. Scholars of ocean-oriented postcolonial writing have emphasized horizontal modes of relations, such as Afro-Asian connections in the Indian Ocean or indigenous-indigenous connections in the Pacific. Postcolonial fictions often deploy forms of magical realism, speculation, pastiche, and fragmentation to convey the absences and silences in the historical archive and alternative epistemologies and ontologies of the colonized. These texts revisit the sea voyages of the past from the perspectives of the enslaved, indentured, and colonized subjects, enabling ways to rethink narratives of globalization from the periphery. They include fictions that depict littoral regions and communities as a site of physical and cultural permeability between the land and the sea, undermining territorial or ethnic exclusivism. While some novels are diasporic narratives reflecting on transoceanic migrations, whether forced or voluntary, undertaken in the past, others depict the perils of sea journeys undertaken by present-day migrants in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Certain fictions also engage with the impacts of continuing militarization of world’s oceans, such as the construction of military bases and nuclear tests in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Still others draw on indigenous knowledge to shed light on the tenuous relationship with the ocean while depicting impacts of global warming and climate change on the precarious existence of both human and nonhuman beings of the sea.