The Trans-actional ocean. Excessive mobilities and immersive temporalities at sea

Abstract

In the attempt to critically interrogate the relationship between critical ocean geographies and the situated knowledges of decolonial, postcolonial, Black, feminist, Indigenous, queer, posthumanist and new materialist studies, this special issue has instead become over time a deep immersion not only in the sea materiality and its structures of colonial power, but also on the positionalities and the production of academic knowledge. In other words, this engagement with multiple valences of critical ocean geographies, beyond opening up alternative ways of thinking about space, relationalities, perspectives, and especially the coloniality of geography, also opens up a breach in the very modes of academic knowledge production that obscures, erases, and selects which seas and which knowledges about the sea are recognized, but also in how we might talk with rather than about the sea. The articles in this special issue, even if from diverse point of views, engage with the sea as a pivotal space for understanding our contemporary world and its accumulation of an ever present past. This is a trans-actional ocean, an ocean whose excessive mobilities and immersive temporalities clash, witness, and interrogate.