ABSTRACT
The ocean features prominently in political theory and practice: from Plato’s “ship of state” to the emergence and expansion of European colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and racialized and gendered forms of violence. This chapter focuses on three “sub-spaces” around the ocean and their political valences in literature and literary studies. The first section explains scholarly study of oceans and the fields called “blue humanities,” “oceanic studies,” and “critical ocean studies.” The second section focuses on the figure of the ship as metaphor and allegory for the state, the nation, and the political body. The third section jumps from the ship to immerse into the sea, arguing that undersea crossings—scalar, spatial, temporal, material—opened room for re-imagination and recovery. The fourth section examines the intertidal and coastal zone as a site that shores up and disperses territorial, political, governmental, and geographic bounds. The last section, “Oceans of Resistance,” surveys methods of resistance or revolution as the flipside of politics and governance.
