Thinking- and telling-with the sea: understanding a trans-actional Mediterranean through Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Abstract

In this article, I look at a Trans-Actional Mediterranean through Critical Ocean Geographies. Looking at stories as possible practices of listening, I listen to Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits: sea-stories, telling the intersectional violence of racial capitalism, as well as of alternative possibilities in a trans-actional sea, made of counter-politics, counter-narratives, counter-subjectivities. The article tries to mobilize some fundamental questions: if the sea is focused by Critical Ocean Geographies as a possible space of other politics and narratives, which counter-politics and counternarratives do we want to think-with? As the narrative of the sea as blank space is particularly useful to the mode of production of racial capitalism and for silencing colonial processes in the dominant archives, can Critical Ocean Geographies become a tool to unearth knowledge and unlearn whiteness? Can them, in research and knowledge production, attempt to mobilize liquid counterarchives, made of violence, but also of other stories to imagine sea spaces of possibilities? I conclude by arguing that turning our gaze to the sea can be a tool to imagine and practice other liquid archives, other relations, other politics