“The ocean archive catalogues the ways we have been laid to waste and have wasted”
“ON New Year’s Day in 1738, the Dutch West India Company vessel Leusden found itself in trouble just off Suriname’s coast.”
“cargo in the hold and nail down the hatches. The cargo, however, was not boxes, barrels, crates, nor even livestock; it was 680 women, men, and children bound for slave markets in the Americas.”
“Despite extensive documentation, the wreck has never been found.”
“It languishes beneath the waves: a hidden trace of capitalism’s birth, of hundreds of peoples’ deaths, and of the ocean’s power to transport, to wreck, to subsume, and eventually, we might imagine, to redeliver.”
“The stories above suggest an oceanic method for narrating history, one that emphasizes loss, wreck, violence, and waste rather than the smooth ascendancy of imperial knowledge and power.”
“Cultural and postcolonial theorists find radical potential in the idea that the ocean keeps track of history and calls us to recount and record it.”
“For many scientists, too, the ocean’s role as a record of history allows it to be studied in truly global ways.”
“In this perhaps unlikely resonance of scientific and postcolonial thought, there emerges what I call the ocean archive: a record of life on Earth, formed and filtered through marine dynamics, and only available to us in partial and unpredictable ways.”
“THE traditional archive stops and isolates history; it periodizes and indexes the past. It sits in a building, often with limited access. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, who famously wrote that archives are in “house arrest,” also wrote that “[the archive] keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion.””
“This “unnatural fashion” of demarcating history is even more untenable in the Anthropocene, when we are constantly aware that we are already living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution and the atom bomb, among other events, and when we are increasingly realizing that it is impossible to stop or cordon off history.”
“The ocean, on the other hand, raises new possibilities for reading human-environmental history.”
“However, the idea that it might be pertinent to the politics of historical knowledge is often unexamined.”
“The ocean could wash humanity clean, buffering us from the effects of carbon combustion, pollution, and nuclear experimentation.”
“But this view of the ocean has been revealed to be a dangerous illusion.”
“Extreme storms, rising seas, and the mass death of carbon-sequestering ocean plankton forcefully show us the ocean’s key role in regulating the climate and fostering life on Earth.”
“IN Poetics of Relation, cultural theorist Edouard Glissant offers a haunting description of undersea routes connecting the African diaspora, signposted by “scarcely corroded” balls and chains: all that remains of slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.”
“He evokes an ocean that is truly global, even singular, but only thinkable through these traces of extreme violence and loss: “the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.””
“ocean space compels necessary and at times defiant retellings.”
“In contrast to stories of inevitable capitalist and imperialist supremacy, oceanic narratives instead suggest what historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call a “multi-headed hydra,” the ongoing re-emergence and re-convergence of what was temporarily subdued and submerged.”
“And yet, as cultural theorist Maeve Tynan has pointed out, these histories can also raise a paralyzing conundrum.”
“On one hand, Tynan argues, the ocean suggests different ways of writing history–alternative narratives of capitalist globalization that emphasize its brutality, its contingency, and its fragility.”
“On the other, it questions legibility, suggesting erasure, circularity, and opacity–what we cannot know, let alone write.”
“This is where some insights from oceanographic science can be useful. A closer look at the ocean’s material properties suggests that this need not be an either/or question, but rather an opportunity to more closely examine what it means to record history.”
“The ocean’s dynamics indicate capacities for memory and motion that shape the conditions of life on a planetary scale, but every advance in knowledge comes with the realization that so much remains unknown, and perhaps even unknowable.”
“Scientists also consider the ocean to be the largest recorder of human history, even as learning this means admitting that it is also rife with inherent uncertainties.”
“Philosopher Donna Haraway writes that being responsible to our entanglements in the world “requires one to know more at the end of the day than the beginning.” Despite the uncertainty inherent to the ocean archive, recognizing that we can learn more is a political and ethical decision.”
“What does the ocean archive compel us to know, and what alliances must we form to know it?”
“We can’t account for everything that’s inside this archive, much less where, when, or how it will emerge from the depths and make itself available to human reading.”
“Any attempt to know the ocean comes up against the necessity of technological mediation. These technologies, too, help produce the ocean archive.”
“These new technologies interact with other nonhumans in the sea. One of the biggest influences on their usefulness to human oceanographers is the degree to which they are colonized by mollusks, a hazard that oceanographers call “biofouling.””
“While new sensing technologies participate in new regimes of Earth system-surveillance, they also lead lives beyond the extension of human intention, due simply to their ability to survive in parts of the ocean that are out of bounds for humans.”
“Nonhuman animals are also at once ocean archivists and readers of the ocean archive. They sense and create changes in ocean composition at various scales. They even participate in oceanographic data collection.”
“Finally, the ocean archive is also read by people far removed from the ambit of ocean science, both at the sea’s edge and far from it.”
“It is read by the bodies of those who consume marine proteins and catalogue the heavy metals that march through the ranks of bioaccumulation. It is read in climate records, in the traces of El Niño droughts and floods, and the famines and loss of life and property that have accompanied them. It is read imaginatively through diasporic genealogies, and through the holes and absences in these genealogies. It is read through artistic, musical, culinary, and various other customs and practices shared across and transformed by ocean basins.”
“As we consider Anthropocene pasts and futures through the ocean’s motions and transformations, we may ask ourselves how best to interpret the ocean archive when we do so consciously and unconsciously, in our bodies and minds, always with partial knowledge, always mediated by technologies and natural forces that change the story.”
“The ocean archive compels us to know more, even if that knowledge is always incomplete.”
“Knowing more means learning in ways inextricably linked with many humans and nonhumans, stretched in relations across and through the seas.”
“Ultimately, to know more means to “cast oneself with some ways of life and not others,” to borrow Haraway’s words. We must not only recognize and value different ways of knowing, but also understand that we are all eventual material for the ocean archive: our bodies, our actions, our infrastructures.”
“The ocean archive catalogues the different ways we have been laid to waste and have wasted, moving our materials in planetary dynamics that might memorialize and reshuffle inequalities, yet unevenly and without stable utopian promise.”
“Ocean forces will continue to work on us, and offer up our traces in ways that will surely exceed our intentions.”
“The ocean archive gives us a future that carries neither easy redemption nor the comfort of predictability, but instead is fraught–both a threat and a promise.”