“The One Who Comes from the Sea”
Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20249124 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sharae Deckard (0000-0003-4064-2035, University College Dublin, corresponding author), Kerstin Oloff (0000-0002-5324-9446, Durham University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 86 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/h9030086 |
| OpenAlex | W3072222677 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 20 |
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
Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction
Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene
Masculinity after Trujillo
Monsters of the Market
Santería
Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times
Covid-19 and Circuits of Capital
Climate justice and the Caribbean
Fueling Culture
Introduction
(Re)encountering monsters
The weird
Oil in the Caribbean
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |