Reading the Sea: An Ecocritical Take on Postcolonial Hybridity and Sea Literatures

What can writings on the sea from diverse places and periods tell us about worldviews and relations between humans, nature and culture? Through the prism of postcolonial ‘blue’ ecocriticism, Evelyne Shamier's dissertation research seeks to capture how texts from and about the global areas where Dutch is/was spoken, relate to histories in which the world's seas play a role – and how these discourses relate to each other. For this, there is a focus on thematic elements (e.g. dystopian depiction of the sea, or romantic, gendered, socio-political, economic, anthropocentric, religious, culinary, etc.). A premise of analysis is that an environment can be a non-human witness to processes of colonialism, decolonization and climate change; moreover, this research sets out to also explore how we can acknowledge the oceans of the world as storytellers themselves.

With a systematic transcontinental perspective on ‘Neerlandophone’ literatures, this research project employs a new alternative to conventionally (euro)centralized approaches in Dutch Studies. Following its decolonial and ecocritical theoretical foundations, the project equally practices an ecological way of thinking with respect to intersectionality and multi-perspectivity, which is reflected in attentions towards multilingualism and local sea literature in other languages.

At ICAS 13, Evelyne Shamier presents a text- and context-oriented case study on postcolonial hybridity in sea literature, through poetry and prose by Antillean, Caribbean-Dutch, Indonesian and Eurasian-Dutch writers. Consequently, this presentation simultaneously comprises an exploration of academic literary tools that may be instrumental as part of the ‘oceanic turn’ within the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.