The sea has always inspired the human imagination in the form of travel narratives, poetry, plays, songs, fiction, films and other media. However, only recently has the ocean has become a critical focus of scholarship and research in the humanities. The twenty-first century has witnessed a new ‘oceanic turn’ in the humanities, moving from land to the ocean, displacing a terracentric (Markus Rediker) view of the world. At a time of extreme weather patterns, melting icecaps, rising sea-levels, ocean acidification, marine pollution and oceanic biodiversity loss, the blue humanities is an important area of emergent research traversing disciplines from history to the visual arts to cultural and literary studies. The blue humanities are characterised by disciplinary fluidity, straddling environmental and marine sciences, maritime history, nautical literature, sea narratives in various media and cultural forms, and more.


The blue humanities view the ocean as a material and social entity, a site and vantage point to rethink political and social relationships, kinship, sovereignty, nations and belonging, as well as the relationship between the human and the non-human. TThe blue humanities offer alternative ways to think about temporality, ontology, epistemology, politics, frontiers, law, ethics, economics; the blue humanities reveal and engage with the ocean in its aesthetic, historical, religious, political, social, and material manifestations, revealing how significant the deep blue is to different facets of (human) life.


This panel for the 2025 ACLA Annual Meeting invites paper proposals that engage with the blue humanities within the South Asian context, from a literary and/or cultural perspective. Proposals are welcome on any aspect of South Asian literature or culture that (re)considers the role and significance of seas and oceans in South Asian history, life and modes of thinking and being. Paper proposals are sought on literary or cultural texts that centre the ocean within South-Asian imaginative and life-worlds. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to:

 

• Migration across oceans in/from South Asia


• Flooding/drought/climate refugees


• Anthropocene oceans


• Ocean acidification


• Storms at sea/tsunamis/currents of disaster


• ‘Wet globalisation’: the ocean and plurality, motion, fluidity, circulation, and exchange


• Oceanic cultures (human and/or nonhuman)


• Racial, class, caste, gendered imaginaries of the sea within the South Asian context


• Contamination/toxicity/transcorporeality


• Fishing/aquatic agricultures


• The sea/ocean in South Asian folk and mythology


• Liquid art/literature/poetics/politics