Stormy weather: Legacies of slavery and emergent forms of political-ecological relation in literary fiction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans

Abstract

Our contribution to this special issue takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies with political ecology to discuss the convergence of meteorological emergencies (storms) and political emergencies (mutinies) in two novels: Martin Delany’s Blake (1859–1862) and Lindsey Collen’s Mutiny (2001). In both novels, oceanic storms provide an opportunity for rebellion—a shipboard uprising of enslaved Africans during an Atlantic hurricane in the former, and a mutiny in a women’s prison timed to coincide with an Indian Ocean cyclone in the latter—and these rebellions in turn precipitate the emergence of new forms of political-ecological relation. Both novels reflect the legacies of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, while also articulating emergent solidarities and relations: between different groups of oppressed peoples and between these peoples and their ecological surroundings. Our central argument is twofold: first, that these “narratives of offshore dissent” use the aesthetic and rhetorical tools of literary fiction to illuminate the key insights of political ecology in terms of the emergent potential of human-nonhuman collectives; and, second, that literary texts can in turn help us to identify and articulate alternative models for human and nonhuman relation. We aim to show that literary studies and political ecology are fields that intersect in compelling ways in terms of thinking through ecological emergency and how humans relate to each other and to the world around us. Ultimately, in view of the centrality of the ocean in both novels, we read these narratives of offshore dissent from a “thalasscentric” or ocean-centered perspective in contraposition to the terracentric vision that predominates in colonialist and nationalist thinking and that has proved so destructive to human and nonhuman beings alike.