“The One Who Comes from the Sea”

Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20249124
AutoresSharae Deckard (0000-0003-4064-2035, University College Dublin, autor correspondente), Kerstin Oloff (0000-0002-5324-9446, Durham University, autor correspondente)
Ano2020
Volume9
Fascículo3
Páginas86
Data de publicação2020-08-19
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h9030086
OpenAlexW3072222677
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas20

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class

Anthropocene · Archaeology · Art · Capitalism · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Literature · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Uncanny · Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies · History · Law · Oil Spill Detection and Mitigation · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature

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