Swim your ground

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

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Geography · Humanities · Humanity · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Subject (documents · White (mutation · Computer Science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• The forgotten Black ocean

  R Benedito Ferrão•Studies in Travel Writing•2024

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• An Aural Ethnography of Black Breath

  Open Access•Ayana Omilade Flewellen•liquid blackness•2025

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• In the Wake

  Open Access•Christina Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth Sharpe•In the Wake•2016

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• Geology of mankind

  Open Access•Paul J Crutzen, Sheldon A Zabel•Nature•2002

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• The Columbian exchange

  Alfred W Crosby, Alfred W Jr Crosby•The Columbian exchange•2003

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• Stand Your Ground

  Darrius D Hills•Black Theology•2016

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• How it Feels to Be Colored Me

  Zora Neale Hurston•Worlds of Difference•2000

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• The birth of African-American culture

  Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Richard N Price•The birth of African-American…•1992

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• The Face of the Deep

  Christian Keller, Catherine Keller•Face of the Deep•2003

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• Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In

  Ed Roberson•Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In•1995

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• Undercurrents of Power

  Kevin Dawson•Undercurrents of Power•2018

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• Civilization and Its Discontents

  Jewel Spears Brooker•The Modern Schoolman•1995

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• Saltwater Slavery

  Stephanie E Smallwood, Stephanie Smallwood•Saltwater Slavery•2007

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• The Universal Machine

  Open Access•Fred Moten•Universal Machine•2018

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• Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet

  Open Access•Daniele Demarco•Global Environment•2020

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• The Ceremony Must be Found

  Sylvia Wynter•boundary 2•1984

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• Barracoon

  Open Access•Martin Larsson, Martin Jesper•Estudios Sociológicos de El…•2022

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• The Lynching of Emmett Till

  Vincent Vinikas, Christopher Metre et al.•The Journal of Southern History•2004

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• Slavery and Social Death

  Orlando Patterson•Slavery and Social Death•2018

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• Black Nature

  Leigh A Willis, L Willis•ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in…•2010

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• Poetics of relation

  Édouard Glissant, Betsy Wing•Poetics of relation•1997

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• The Anthropocene

  Will Steffen, Paul J Crutzen et al.•AMBIO•2007

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• Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic

  Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Omise''Eke Natasha Tinsley et al.•GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay…•2008

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