ABSTRACT
A vital set of positions are being elaborated through oceanic immersion in response to the rising waters of the blue Anthropocene. Through discussion of a South African novel, Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker, this chapter attends to the “oceanic south” in search of new perspectives on what it means to inhabit an increasingly blue planet and offers inundation as conceptual counterpart to submergence. Rather than evoking the universalised figure of the Anthropos or marking an epochal rupture, the material metaphor of inundation is shown to elicit diffractive readings of the planetary crisis as manufactured by the late capitalist procedures of extraction, consumption and disposal. Administered by containerisation, these procedures were initially hammered out during the slave trade and in states of coloniality. Keeping the north afloat while exacerbating the precarity of the south, they underline the need to recast the blue Anthropocene through the oceanic south and to reclaim the metaphor of inundation from its dematerialisation in the lifeboat discourses of the north.
