Swim your ground: Towards a black and blue humanities

Abstract

This essay engages with the prevailing metaphor in our talk about ecological crisis: humanity’s carbon “footprint.” As a fitting place to begin thinking about humanity's excessive footprint and dominating interface with the planet, I suggest humanity’s first large-scale encounter with the deep sea during the transatlantic age of exploration and colonization. Or the opportunity our species had to learn that an earthling is hardly the sort of creature whose interface with a mostly blue planet can be rightly typified as a standing. Critiquing the global rise of what I call the “stand your ground subject,” I suggest the drowned Africans remembered in Olaudah Equiano’s narrative as the “inhabitants of the deep,” as a more promising place for the humanities to begin, in Alice Walker’s words, to “reclaim a proper relationship to the world” through an oceanic recalibration of the human.

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