ABSTRACT
The rise of environmental scholarship in recent decades, including the elds of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, has been simultaneous with an ‘oceanic turn’. Generally speaking, the former elds represent interdisciplinary engagements with the representations of territorially-based place and have recently begun to theorise mobility and displacement across biotic, regional, national, and (post)colonial boundaries. In contradistinction, the eld of what I call ‘critical ocean studies’ has shifted from a long-term concern with mobility and uidity across transoceanic surfaces to theorising ways of embedding, animating, and submerging, rendering vast oceanic space into place. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene will be the focus of this chapter.
