ABSTRACT
Oceans are material sites filled with anima. Currents, waves, tides, wind patterns, flows of water bodies, circulations of marine, biotic and non-human species are only some of the densities that contribute to oceanic anima. Historically, the ocean has been an imagined place of infinite plenitude and expansive openness. Its open-ended horizons overwhelmed much of terrestrially bound social explanations for the production of cognitive imaginaries. “Life is a creative striving to maintain and expresses its capacity to establish a norm,” writes Elizabeth Povinelli. This dynamic of becoming, the affective process of realizing human potentiality, is materially embodied in the lost histories of oceanic epistemologies. The path-breaking work of Suzanne Césaire writing out of the Caribbean during the 1930s and 1940s is one of the sites of oceanic potentiality. Suzanne Cesaire establishes one of the foundational formulations for a decolonial, feminist oceanic ontology. In Cesaire’s work, the Caribbean Sea is a distinctive space of human potentiality.
