Ecoceanic(a) : Multilingualism,oceanic science fiction,decoloniality,and the ambivalences of anthology-making

Abstract

This article analyses Ecoceanic/Ecoceanica (Future Fiction, 2024), an anthology of Southern science fiction, to show how its form exposes the ambivalences of decolonial publishing. Far from functioning as a neutral container, the anthology operates as a formal device that both disrupts and depends on inherited national and linguistic hierarchies — through its dual publication in English and Italian, its editorial choices, and its deliberate retention of unglossed words — while also moving away from national boundaries towards a polycentric South–South literary space where the ocean, rather than the nation, emerges as the organizing principle. Yet this oceanic framing also reveals the tension between decolonial aspirations, such as foregrounding Global South voices, challenging linguistic hierarchies, and undoing a western teleology of modernity and progress, and the global routes of translation and mediation through which the anthology circulates. The article, therefore, aims to explore this ambivalence, which underpins the ecological politics articulated in the stories, illuminated here through Malcolm Ferdinand’s concept of écologie décoloniale. Ecoceanic translates Ferdinand’s framework into imaginative futures where marine environments foreground relations between humans and nonhumans, advancing a planetary poetics that couples anthology design with decolonial ecological thought, while simultaneously revealing the structural tensions that condition such work.

Introduction

Anthologies have long been integral to literary traditions, yet they occupy a paradoxical position within academia and publishing, owing to their composite and elusive nature. Although single-authored works such as novels, poetry collections, or works of non-fiction are not entirely exempt from taxonomic ambiguity, anthologies are particularly susceptible to it, as they “violate modern readers’ expectation that the material unit (the book) should coincide with a verbal unit (the text)” (Price, 2000: 3). Critics have variously described the anthology as a “bizarre textual synecdoche” (Bloom, 1999: 406), a meta-genre that exceeds the texts it gathers (Srivastava, 2010: 151), an “invisible genre” (Buchholtz, 2022: 85), a form of literary storage and communication (Kuipers, 2003: 51), and both a monument to the past and a document for the future (Van den Bergh, 2017: 3). Terms such as miscellany, florilegium, reader, or collection are often used interchangeably, deepening this definitional haze.

Their ambiguous form, however, is not the only reason anthologies have been marginalized within literary culture. Their association with commercial motives has often prompted suspicion, casting them as market-driven enterprises or functional tools rather than literary works in their own right (Di Leo, 2004: 10). Even when their aims are pedagogical rather than commercial, anthologies have been dismissed as “superficial, offering a hop, skip, and jump through literary history instead of providing in-depth views of truly great works” (Lauter, 2004: 19).

Recent criticism has begun to reassess the anthology’s potential, arguing that its strategies of juxtaposition and selection possess not only pedagogical but also cultural, literary, and political significance, engaging readers, fostering community, and generating meaning through the relationships and contrasts among the texts it assembles (Di Leo, 2004: 10). Anthologies are increasingly recognized as instruments of “subversion, resistance, and repair” within processes of canon-formation and nation-building (Taurino, 2023: 13). In this sense, they do not simply reflect literary traditions but actively shape them, either reinforcing dominant narratives through selective emphasis on certain texts, authors, and languages, or unsettling them by introducing new styles and voices that challenge established hierarchies (Srivastava, 2010: 152).

This renewed attention has also foregrounded form, revalued as a site where literary meaning is both shaped and destabilized. Emma Bond, for instance, examines the process of assemblage in contemporary anthologies, arguing that fragmentation and lack of unity — often seen as limitations — can instead be productive and generative. Anthologies’ inherent heterogeneity, she notes, facilitates flexible modes of arrangement and interpretation shaped by editors, publishers, and readers (Bond, 2019: 157–58). This multiplicity allows readers “to establish connections through heterogeneity, affective mapping, and alternative modes of communicating across boundaries” (Bond, 2019: 157).

Extending Bond’s insights, this article approaches the anthology not only as a formally heterogeneous assemblage but also as a site where aesthetic choices intersect with ideological and political negotiations. In what follows, I consider how Ecoceanic: Southern Flows (2024), a science fiction anthology edited by Tarun K. Saint and Francesco Verso, mobilizes the anthology form to both enact and expose the tensions between pluralism and the structural constraints — linguistic, editorial, and institutional — through which it operates. Published by Future Fiction, a small independent press co-founded by Francesco Verso and Francesco Mantovani in 2018, in both English and Italian, Ecoceanic brings together ten science fiction texts (one poem and nine short stories) written by authors from the Global South (Australia, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania). The Italian edition, Ecoceanica. Futuri dal Sud Globale, features Italian translations of all nine texts originally written in English and one originally written in Spanish. As a science fiction anthology bringing together writers from diverse geographical contexts, Ecoceanic exemplifies the anthology’s capacity to foster “communication across boundaries” (Bond, 2019: 157), a dynamic further reinforced by its publication in both English and Italian. Centred on the ecological and social consequences of rising sea levels, the anthology situates these crises from Southern Hemisphere perspectives, encouraging dialogue across languages and regions. In doing so, it moves beyond nation-based frameworks to imagine alternative responses to the global dominance of western economic and environmental models.

Postcolonial science fiction, in particular, has emerged as a fruitful mode for navigating the entanglements between western systems of power and locally rooted imaginaries of resistance and renewal. As critics such as Grace Dillon (2012) and John R. Lavender III (2019) have shown, speculative and science fiction writing from postcolonial perspectives enables a critical interrogation of how global structures — empire, capitalism, technoscience — collide with, reshape, or are resisted by local realities. While the speculative signals an imaginative openness to alternative possibilities, science fiction more specifically engages with technologies and futures that expose the conflict between western scientific methods and Indigenous knowledge and understanding of the world (Langer, 2011). Within postcolonial writing, speculative and science fiction converge as narrative strategies that, following Dillon’s formulation of “cultural sovereignty and futurity”, reclaim the right to imagine futures grounded in local epistemologies rather than those imposed by colonial modernity (2012: 2). Lavender similarly argues that postcolonial and Afrodiasporic science fiction reconfigures dominant narratives of technology and progress to reflect situated histories of dispossession, migration, and resistance (2019: 7).

More recent scholarship, however, has questioned the adequacy of the postcolonial frame itself. Critics note that, while the postcolonial paradigm has been crucial in analysing the afterlives of empire, it often remains tethered to the binary logic of colonizer and colonized, metropole and peripheries, and to a historical temporality that presumes the aftermath of colonialism rather than its ongoing mutations. Scholars such as Caio A. M. Simoneti (2022) and Nimisha Sinha (2023) argue that speculative and science fiction works increasingly imagine planetary or decolonial futures that exceed the temporal and spatial limits of the postcolonial, foregrounding global interdependence, ecological crisis, and alternative epistemologies of coexistence. This shift does not reject postcolonial critique but expands it toward more fluid, world-scaled models of relation and resistance.

Within this evolving critical landscape, Ecoceanic inhabits an in-between space that draws simultaneously on science fiction and speculative fiction, and on postcolonial, decolonial, and global frameworks, exposing the points where these intersect, overlap, and diverge. Through the following analysis, I aim to show how Ecoceanic’s curatorial and thematic strategies register the persistence of postcolonial concerns — linguistic practices, uneven globalization, and imperialism — even as they gesture toward a more planetary imaginary not necessarily focused on colonial histories or legacies. This coexistence, at once conflictual and generative, reveals the anthology’s dual investment in and resistance to the aesthetic and epistemic frameworks it inherits, a dynamic that unfolds across both its formal design and its thematic concerns.

Jessica Langer’s argument is instructive here, as she writes that:

the production of postcolonial science fiction participate[s] uniquely in [the] process of decolonization, utilizing the particular strengths and possibilities contained [in] the science fiction genre to further the project of a world not only politically but economically, culturally, intellectually and/or creatively decolonized. (2011: 8)

Although Langer writes from a postcolonial standpoint, her emphasis on participating in decolonization already blurs the boundary between the postcolonial and the decolonial, reframing science fiction as an imaginative practice that does not merely critique empire, but works toward epistemic and cultural reconfiguration. Read through this lens, Ecoceanic’s use of science fiction extends this dual movement: it both acknowledges the continuities of colonial histories and envisions futures grounded in ecological and cultural interdependence. More than a compilation of discrete works, Ecoceanic can be read as a vessel of resistance against neo-colonial narratives and western literary conventions surrounding nature and scientific progress, foregrounding non-western epistemologies (Pordzik, 2001: 31). It thus calls for what Emma Bond describes as a postcolonial “reading of assemblage”, where postcolonialism signals a capacity for subversion and transformation (2019: 160). Yet Ecoceanic’s resistance is not without ambivalence: as an edited and translated anthology published in the West and in two former colonial languages, it also reproduces some of the asymmetries it seeks to challenge. As the article will show, the anthology operates as both a decolonial device — unsettling inherited structures of authority and meaning — and a reminder of the persistent infrastructures that frame and, at times, constrain its radical potential.

To better understand this ambivalent position, the analysis turns to Malcolm Ferdinand, whose work offers a crucial framework for examining the intersection of (post)colonial histories, decolonial politics, and ecological thought, explored here through the genre of science fiction and the anthology form. Ferdinand, a French Caribbean political philosopher, develops the concept of écologie décoloniale, which calls for an environmental politics grounded in the legacies of colonialism and committed to justice across human and nonhuman relations. Central to Ferdinand’s argument is the imperative to address ecological crises not in isolation, but in direct relation to colonial histories and their present-day continuations in the form of global capitalism, neo-imperialism, and systematic racial inequality. For Ferdinand, the central task is to address what he calls modernity’s “colonial and environmental double fracture”, the false separation between the domination of humans through slavery and colonization and the exploitation of nonhuman life through capitalist and technocratic extraction. This fracture, he argues, continues to structure contemporary thought and policy, preventing truly decolonial and ecological forms of justice (Ferdinand, 2022: 178–79). In response to this fracture, Ferdinand calls for “composing with pluralities”, an ethical and political practice that replaces separation with relation, thus cultivating inclusive forms of coexistence among humans, nonhumans, and ecological systems (2022: 230). As the following analysis will show, Ecoceanic resonates with this idea, both thematically and structurally, as it imagines networks of interdependence that unsettle anthropocentric and colonial logics.

The anthology is particularly suited to this purpose, as its very form embodies plurality, bringing together editors and authors, styles and themes, and multiple genres within a shared material and imaginative space. Weihsin Gui’s conception of the anthology as a “circulatory and fluid form” rather than “a strictly structured container of various pieces” is particularly relevant here (2022: 236). Gui suggests that the multi-vocal and layered structure of anthologies becomes a formal analogy to the fluid, relational histories of the ocean:

Through their form and arrangement, anthologies collecting the works of new and emerging writers can generate fresh ways of understanding the overlapping, polyphonic histories and socialities of those who traverse and look back across the [Indian] Ocean. (2022: 233)

Ecoceanic’s polyphonic design similarly mirrors the ocean’s fluidity, allowing diverse voices to coexist without resolving into a single narrative or regional identity. In doing so, the anthology not only embodies the connective, tidal movement that Gui associates with oceanic history, but also exposes the structural tensions inherent to such a project: while it opens a space for transnational encounter, it remains mediated by editorial, linguistic, and institutional frameworks that shape how these encounters are staged. Rather than consolidating a canon, Ecoceanic thus operates as a provisional and exploratory site — one that engages with ecological precarity and the uneven realities of climate change from Southern vantage points, “charting un/explored literary territories” (Domínguez, 2014: 9), yet continually negotiating the limits of its own form.

These formal and curatorial ambivalences provide the foundation for the analysis that follows. The first part of this article examines Ecoceanic’s form, focusing on its use of language, paratextual framing, and editorial strategies. Here, I explore how the anthology’s curatorial choices — its branding as science fiction, its transnational range, and its reliance on inherited publishing conventions — reveal a productive tension between postcolonial and decolonial orientations. Framed as a work of global science fiction, Ecoceanic seeks to unsettle hierarchies of knowledge and representation, yet its structure and circulation also reproduce some of the asymmetries it aims to challenge. The second part of the article shifts to a thematic analysis, examining how the anthology attempts to move beyond the human/nature divide by including nonhumans as agents rather than marginal figures.

The anthology as an ambivalent form: Multilingualism and decolonial aspiration

Ecoceanic is part of a broader series committed to promoting speculative fiction globally. According to its website, the series presents “a selection of the best voices in the field of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction from the World” (Future Fiction, 2018), foregrounding multilingualism and translation. Future Fiction privileges anthologies over single-author volumes, pairing internationally recognized writers with authors who are well known in their local contexts but less visible in the global Anglophone market. This editorial strategy reflects a curatorial ethos grounded in diversity and accessibility, which Ecoceanic clearly exemplifies. Indeed, it features established figures such as Vandana Singh (India), Eugen Bacon (Tanzania/Australia), and Sam Beckbessinger (South Africa), alongside emerging writers like Chinaza Eziaghighala (Nigeria) and Soham Guha (India), both on the verge of publishing their first novels. The anthology does not organize the stories by geography or genre, nor according to the contributors’ literary stature. Instead, it adopts a non-hierarchical structure in which each author is introduced with a brief italicized biographical note highlighting their linguistic, cultural, and geographical affiliations, as well as their prior publications. The editors are presented in the same manner at the end of the volume. This curatorial strategy exemplifies what Mirosława Buchholtz terms the anthology’s “democratizing impulse”, an approach that resists imposed coherence or hierarchy and creates space for coexistence within the collection (2022: 95). This democratizing impulse unfolds across several levels. For readers, it encourages exploratory engagement, resisting any prescribed hierarchy of texts or reading order; for the authors, it grants visibility and legitimacy to emerging writers alongside established ones, constructing what Craig Santos Perez describes as a “gathering place”, a place where reputational hierarchies are temporarily suspended and diverse voices meet without erasure or homogenization and stories are like “islands” that hold plural Southern voices (2020: 245). At the paratextual level, Ecoceanic’s title and framing point to a curatorial logic that moves beyond nation-based models, taking the ocean as its organizing principle, both thematically and structurally. The anthology’s explicit reference to the Global South reinforces a macro-regional perspective that foregrounds shared colonial histories, ecological vulnerability, and forms of epistemic solidarity across South–South contexts. This orientation avoids flattening local specificities, instead underscoring how global processes such as climate change, extractivism, and migration intersect with distinct ecological, linguistic, and cultural contexts.

Yet Ecoceanic does not entirely escape the pull of hierarchy or nation-based structuring. For example, the anthology closes with Vandana Singh’s “The Word for World is Ocean”, the longest story in the volume and the only one set entirely beyond Earth. Unlike the coastal or amphibious geographies explored in other contributions, Singh imagines a wholly oceanic planet where ecological politics unfold on a post-terrestrial scale. Her narrative acts as a conceptual and thematic culmination of the volume’s exploration of ecological futurism. Singh’s prominence is reinforced by her visibility in Tarun K. Saint’s introduction, which repeatedly cites her critical work to articulate the anthology’s intellectual framework (2024: 5, 9). This intratextual dialogue between editorial commentary and Singh’s fiction subtly reorders the collection’s non-hierarchical structure: the positioning of her story as both structural endpoint and interpretive key suggests that the anthology still reflects deliberate editorial hierarchies that shape readers’ orientation and direction.

The title itself, too, encapsulates the anthology’s ambivalence: while the coined term Ecoceanic deliberately avoids national affiliation, emphasizing ecological interconnection and oceanic fluidity, this curatorial gesture contrasts with the contents page and the introduction, where authors’ nationalities are repeatedly listed, reasserting the very categories the title appears to transcend. Saint incidentally observes that the contributors largely come from former British colonies (except for Peru), thereby hinting at another organizing principle grounded in shared colonial histories. ¹ Thus, while Ecoceanic posits the ocean as its central metaphor, fluidly connecting geographies and epistemologies, its paratexts simultaneously reinscribe the national and imperial frameworks it seeks to unsettle.

This ambiguity becomes most visible in how contributors are presented, since their biographies often exceed the stable category, their place of birth, under which they are classified. Many are migrant or multilingual writers whose trajectories complicate any straightforward association with a single nation-state. Several have studied, worked, or published in the Global North, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Eugen Bacon, for instance, was born in Tanzania, studied in Britain, and now lives in Australia; Vandana Singh, labelled in the volume as Indian, resides in the United States, where she teaches Physics and Environment. Their biographies exemplify its investment in a fluid, transnational discourse (Rambsy, 2011: 52) that resists national containment and reveals strong connections to the Global North. Even so, the anthology’s editorial apparatus shows a tendency to categorize contributors using fixed geopolitical markers (2024: 10−13).

Another paratextual element that exposes how the anthology’s formal openness is continually negotiated through the pragmatics of translation and circulation is the subtitle Southern Flows, purposefully adapted between languages to align with distinct linguistic and cultural sensibilities. In English, Southern Flows appeals to readers interested in perspectives that move beyond a Western Atlantic focus, evoking also plurality and movement — currents, migrations, exchanges — without fixing a precise geopolitical frame. The term Southern remains suggestive rather than categorical, invoking a relational orientation rather than a defined geography. In the Italian edition, however, the title becomes Futuri dal Sud Globale (“Futures from the Global South”), a translation that shifts emphasis from metaphorical direction to political geography. It directly invokes the critical vocabulary of postcolonial and decolonial discourse, thus situating the anthology within contemporary debates on global inequality and cultural reorientation.

This negotiation extends beyond the title to other paratextual and material features of the volume. Further examples appear in the use of unglossed words and endnotes. The latter, absent in Ecoceanic, appear in Ecoceanica only to clarify two specific cultural and linguistic references. They explain the mention of the Eid moon, which marks the end of fasting and the beginning of Eid, in Kaiser Haq’s opening, satirical poem “The New Frontier” (about the Arctic and the hypocritical behaviour of wealthier countries towards environmental issues), and the untranslatable wordplay between gate and the concluding words of the Heart Sutra mantra, gate gate pāragate pārasamgate, in Vajra Chandrasekera’s meditation “Half-Eaten Cities” about gill-equipped humans struggling to adapt to the consequences of melted ice caps (2024: 21, 126). However, the translators’ endnotes seem less focused on familiarizing Italian readers with the cultural contexts of Islam and Buddhism and more on addressing the linguistic challenges posed by these texts. Specifically, the notes highlight the complexity of the puns and the inherent difficulty — if not impossibility — of fully reproducing them in Italian. ²

By dispensing with explanatory notes or glossaries, Ecoceanic enacts what Édouard Glissant terms the “right to opacity”, or the assertion that cultural difference need not be made transparent or legible within dominant frameworks of understanding (1997: 189). In the context of postcolonial fiction, such opacity acquires political force, resisting what John R. Lavender III describes as “semiotic imperialism”: the tendency of dominant languages, particularly English, to absorb and standardize meaning across cultural contexts, thereby erasing local nuance and epistemological difference (2019: 44). Rather than treating English, Italian, or Spanish as neutral vehicles of global exchange, the anthology affirms linguistic multiplicity as a mode of resistance, insisting on the partial irreducibility of local meaning within global literary circuits.

This commitment to opacity is also reflected in the short stories’ linguistic texture. Several instances in Ecoceanic show that words in languages other than English are left untranslated and unglossed, as in the case of kwashiorkor (74) from the Ga language of Ghana in Eugen Bacon’s short story. In Soham Guha’s “Mare Tranquillitatis”, the first-person narrator similarly employs terms such as jhopra and Muktijuddho without providing translation or context (2024: 36). In one instance, when the term chitenge appears in Bacon’s story, the author briefly clarifies it as “a flowing wrap” (74). By embedding unglossed and culturally specific terms, often marked typographically in italics, Ecoceanic extends its resistance to linguistic domestication, challenging the assumption that dominant languages can seamlessly render other cultures legible. These untranslated terms assert the agency of postcolonial science fiction writers to centre local epistemologies and unsettle the presumed universality of colonial languages, foregrounding linguistic and cultural specificity as forms of narrative resistance.

These linguistic choices point to a deeper dynamic between translation and anthology-making that reveals the structural ambivalence at the heart of the form. The very strategies that resist assimilation (retaining untranslated words, privileging opacity, and foregrounding linguistic plurality) also expose the anthology’s dependence on translation (into Italian) and on English and Spanish as former colonial languages. In Ecoceanic, this tension is not resolved, nor deliberately addressed by the editors; rather, it is implicitly enacted through the formal choices of the single authors and translators. The result is a contact zone that is at once subversive and mediating, which makes visible the infrastructures of translation and mediation on which the anthology depends.

Santivañez’s short story makes this dynamic especially vivid. Its inclusion connects Peruvian Amazonian experience to Indian Ocean and South Asian coastal realities, illustrating how science fiction invites readers to imagine alternative modernities, epistemologies, and ecological futures emerging from the peripheries rather than the centres of power, mediating between technological modernity and Indigenous knowledge (Mukherjee, 2010: 115–42). Language, too, reinforces this orientation. The use of untranslated terms such as ishpingo (a tree of the Ocotea genus, in Quechua) and paiches (a large Amazonian fish) evokes the flora and fauna of the Amazon basin, specifically the Marañón River, while others, such as yopo, comuneros, and soles, situate the narrative within wider social and economic contexts of the region (2024: 109, 116, 123). Even more striking, a lyric in Cacataibo, an Indigenous language spoken in the Peruvian Amazon, appears without gloss, notes, or translation (2024: 120). By choosing not to translate these words and lines, translator Rachael Amoruso mirrors a key linguistic strategy elsewhere in the anthology: allowing opacity to stand as a form of resistance and, at the formal level, challenging western expectations of cultural transparency (Dillon, 2012: 6). As Langer observes, the science in science fiction might “refer to a process of simultaneous recuperation of indigenous scientific literacy and incorporation of those elements of western science that prove beneficial” (2011: 130). Santivañez’s story enacts this negotiation through language, by transforming language itself into the site where scientific modernity and Indigenous cosmology meet without subsuming one another. Untranslated, culturally embedded words thus function not merely as stylistic markers but as entry points into alternative cosmologies, where meaning travels through worldviews that exceed western rationalist frames.

It is therefore useful to read these linguistic strategies as formal correlates of a broader epistemological project, what Jessica Langer has identified as a defining feature of postcolonial science fiction: its capacity to bring western scientific worldviews into conversation with oral, spiritual, and Indigenous knowledge systems (2011: 8). Noting that western knowledge is also a local tradition which has spread globally through colonization, Langer explains that:

Just as postcolonialism refers not to nativism and the drive for purity and culture, but rather to a process of emergence from colonialism and negotiation of postcolonial identity, so might the “science” in postcolonial science fiction refer to a similar process of simultaneous recuperation of indigenous scientific literacy and incorporation of those elements of Western science that prove beneficial. (2011: 130)

Accordingly, the protagonist of Santivañez’s short story, upon returning to the shores of the Marañón after his sister’s death from water pollution years earlier, discovers a potential solution to the ongoing contamination through revelation. After inhaling yopo seeds, a psychoactive substance, he experiences a spiritual encounter with his deceased sister.This moment of connection blurs the boundary between material and immaterial realms, suggesting that Indigenous knowledge and ancestral guidance can offer transformative solutions to ecological crises. The story hints at interplay between Indigenous knowledge and scientific research: in a dream-like vision, the protagonist glimpses hexagonal forms that lead him to use polymers derived from nirmali, a local plant, to break down oil waste, suggesting that ecological renewal can emerge from the convergence of cultural insight and ecological innovation.

This framing aligns with Future Fiction’s broader editorial vision and with Ecoceanic’s stated aim to imagine futures in which scientific and Indigenous epistemologies coexist. Marketed as science fiction in Tarun K. Saint’s introduction and, at times, as climate fiction (cli-fi) on the back cover, the anthology foregrounds its engagement with technological innovation, space travel, robotics, and climate change, particularly in relation to rising sea levels and melting ice caps (2024: 5). Yet this self-definition exposes another layer of ambivalence: the porous boundary between science fiction and speculative fiction. Saint repeatedly employs the term science fiction (2024: 5, 8, 9, 10, 14) but occasionally pairs it with speculative fiction, as in “writers of science (and speculative) fiction have engaged […]” and “writers of science and speculative fiction were invited […]” (6, 9), without clarifying the distinction. This slippage is revealing, since speculative fiction, unlike the more empirically grounded tradition of science fiction, has increasingly served as a space for imagining alternative epistemologies, temporalities, and futures beyond western technoscientific paradigms (Attebery, 2014; Bould, 2021). While science fiction tends to extrapolate from scientific or technological premises to imagine possible futures, speculative fiction designates a broader, more flexible category encompassing forms of world-making that may exceed scientific rationality (Araújo and Gomes, 2020; Sinha 2023).

Some stories in Ecoceanic blur this very boundary. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s oneiric and allusive narrative, for instance, evokes Nidrā Devi, the Hindu goddess of sleep, privileging mythic imagination and introspection over technological extrapolation (131–35). Vajra Chandrasekera’s story presents a “what if” scenario in which, after catastrophic sea-level rise, humans evolve bioengineered gills (125–28). Thoraiya Dyer’s contribution alternates between near- and far-future timelines: the former culminating in apocalyptic collapse, the latter following aquatic nonhumans whose survival depends on lunar migration (137–56). Tarun K. Saint explains that the texts gathered in the anthology “posit imaginative responses” to the climate crisis and express “a quest for alternative paradigms to the neo-liberal models of development and consumerism that are pushing us to the very brink of disaster” (2024: 6). This editorial framing resonates with Olga Campofreda’s notion of the experimental anthology, characterized by a top-down model that does not simply compile pre-existing texts but actively commissions new material “by asking questions about a specific subject” (2018: 109).

Ecoceanic thus, once again, inhabits a productive tension: although mostly framed as science fiction, where science foregrounds “the conflict between Western scientific methods and discourse of scientific progress and indigenous methods of knowledge production and understanding of the world” (Langer, 2011: 9), the anthology also gestures toward the speculative, in the sense that its stories expand beyond rigid generic boundaries, opening imaginative spaces for myth and “imaginative responses” oriented toward epistemic reworlding and non-western models of development. It is precisely through this speculative openness that the anthology’s ecological and decolonial dimensions become most visible. The second part of this article will show how this latter approach is fulfilled in selected stories through what Malcolm Ferdinand terms écologie décoloniale: a mode of thought and practice that confronts the colonial entanglements of environmental destruction and calls for a more just and inclusive planetary future.

Oceanic ecologies and decolonial futures

The following section turns to thematic continuities across the anthology’s stories, particularly those that, as Saint notes, respond to global warming by imagining strategies of survival, adaptation, and coexistence, resisting the genre’s more familiar “Hollywood-style spectacles” and catastrophic imaginaries (2024: 8). Yet, Saint’s introduction situates Ecoceanic within a lineage of oceanic science fiction that predominantly references western and Anglophone (male) writers such as J. G. Ballard, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville (2024: 7−8). This positioning implicitly acknowledges continuity (or at least dialogue) with established western literary traditions, while simultaneously signalling a departure from them through the anthology’s Southern focus. The result is a revealing ambivalence, as Ecoceanic is framed through coordinates of western science fiction even as it seeks to reconfigure them from a different geopolitical and epistemic standpoint.

The ocean itself, as the title Ecoceanic suggests, functions not only as a recurring motif but also as a structuring principle. Saint highlights its symbolic and historical resonance by sketching a wide literary genealogy, from The Odyssey and the Mahābhārata to The Tempest and Moby-Dick, describing the sea’s “ambiguous pull” on the human imagination (2024: 8). While this genealogy reinforces the ocean’s universality as a metaphor, it also risks recentring a western canon even as the anthology seeks to displace it. Although the term Blue Humanities is not explicitly invoked, its influence is evident in the collection’s critical orientation: the ocean is conceived as a connective, fluid medium that unsettles national boundaries and foregrounds planetary interrelation. Saint references Ocean as Method (2022), edited by Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie, to highlight the ocean’s capacity to reframe literary geographies around mobility, trade, and migration. This approach resonates with Steve Mentz’s notion of the Blue Humanities as “a poetics of planetary water” that clarifies “the relationships between humans and water in all its forms and phases” (2024: 2), and with Serpil Oppermann’s definition of the field as a transdisciplinary inquiry into planetary waters and their sociocultural, ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological dimensions (2023: 1). In Ecoceanic, then, the sea is read both as an archive of colonial relations and as a space through which new, decolonial futures can be charted.

Yet I argue that Ecoceanic not only explores human communities across maritime, postcolonial, and neocolonial routes but also expands its own framework by foregrounding relationships between humans and nonhumans, reimagining kinship, care, and knowledge production in ecological terms. In doing so, the anthology echoes Ferdinand’s call to dismantle colonial logics that regulate not only relations among humans but also those between human and nonhuman life. For Ferdinand, this dismantling is central to any decolonial project and requires an ethical practice of “composing with pluralities” — of building worlds through multiplicity rather than hierarchy (2022: 230). In Ferdinand’s words, ecological thought should be:

intertwined with the urgency of political, epistemic, scientific, legal and philosophical struggles to dismantle the colonial structure of living together and the ways of inhabiting the Earth that still maintain the domination of racialized people, particularly women, in modernity’s hold. (2022: 14)

Placing this alongside Langer’s account of postcolonial science fiction as a practice that participates in decolonization, rather than merely critiques empire, helps to explain Ecoceanic’s ambivalence: some stories inhabit science fiction’s techno-futures while others lean toward a speculative mode beyond postcolonial frames, as in the abovementioned contributions by Thoraiya Dyer and Vajra Chandrasekera.

The short story “Undercurrency” by South African author Sam Beckbessinger productively engages with this tension. It centres on Olivia Abrahams, a profit-driven kelp farm owner operating in an unspecified South African coastal location, and Jorge Cabal, a malacologist from Angola working at the University of Coimbra. Olivia is initially portrayed as a demanding boss whose relationship to the sea is largely extractive, viewing it through the lens of commodification (90). Her mindset, shaped by her prior corporate career in Cape Town, is briefly foregrounded as she surveys her maritime farm and reflects: “What she sees now isn’t the sea — but possibilities. A perfect blank slate” (90). This vision of the ocean as a blank slate echoes the colonial imaginary of terra nullius, where unclaimed land (or seascape, in this case) is construed as ripe for ownership, exploitation, and profit.

By framing the kelp farm as a maritime analogue to the land-based plaas, the story evokes colonial history via the long tradition of the plaasroman, the Afrikaner farm novel that, as J. M. Coetzee observes, “constructs the white man’s claim to the land through the figure of the benevolent patriarch, whose stewardship naturalises domination” (1988: 7). However, Beckbessinger’s story does not reproduce this framework uncritically. Instead, it subverts it by relocating the site of productive labour to the ocean and reconfiguring the power and racial dynamics, as the protagonist now occupies the position of the owner, driven by the same logics of profit and exploitation that once underpinned the plaas.

Olivia’s economic ambition is gradually destabilized by her encounters with enigmatic marine life and by Jorge’s ecological reflections, which reveal the ocean as an active, inscrutable force that resists commodification. In doing so, the story harnesses science fiction’s epistemological openness not only to imagine future economies based on marine farming, but also to reframe the farm as a site not of mastery, but of vulnerability, symbiosis, and eventual relinquishment of control. This internalized colonial discourse is closely tied to the capitalist notion of exploiting natural resources, as Olivia initially perceives the sea not as a complex ecosystem but as either a threat or merely a source of labour. Her mindset gradually shifts when she discovers Jorge diving in her kelp farm, searching for snails and studying their adaptation to the new habitat. As Olivia overcomes her fear of the water and begins diving alongside him, her physical proximity to the marine environment, which she previously controlled and managed from land, introduces her to overwhelming bodily sensations and tactile experiences she had never encountered:

She wants to touch everything, pull everything into herself. She runs her hands along the frilled edges of the fronds, into the bubbles that float out of her mouth. She reaches towards the smooth little drones running busily up and down the lines like bees. (98)

Olivia’s bodily experience of the ocean has long been suppressed due to her psychological condition, Catastrophic Anxiety Disorder (CAD), triggered by recurring visions of rising waters engulfing her and her family (2024: 93–94). Her eventual shift towards a more empathetic engagement with the ocean unfolds through tactile interaction and the acknowledgment of nonhuman agency. This transformation resonates with Malcolm Ferdinand’s call to embed environmental practices within a decolonial framework that includes nonhuman life. In one passage, Olivia and Jorge mimic “the faces of the fish they find underwater”, establishing interspecies connection (100). Following this encounter, Olivia begins to perceive the kelp not as a field to be controlled, but as a forest to be inhabited (99).

However, Beckbessinger’s story also foregrounds the tensions between capitalist exploitation, ecological stewardship, and postcolonial histories. When a company offers to buy Olivia’s farm to produce kelp-based biofuel, a supposedly carbon-neutral energy source meant to fuel future industrial development in Africa, she feels conflicted. Olivia finds herself caught between supporting a carbon-free energy economy that nonetheless exploits the ocean and recognizing her role as a woman of colour being positioned as a symbolic figurehead for a greenwashing campaign. Her unease intensifies when asked about farm expansion, exposing the underlying logics of extractivism disguised as sustainable development:

She remembers her high school history teacher telling them about the Scramble of Africa, a group of white men sitting around a table, drawing straight lines across a map, dividing up a continent they didn’t understand. Fleetingly, she wonders who might stamp passports for the whales. (102)

The same exploitative logic of colonialism resurfaces here as a form of neo-water imperialism that seeks to create, in Jorge’s words, “an ocean that’s nothing but farms” (2024: 106). Donna Haraway’s notion of the Plantationocene clarifies the stakes. She describes it as “a system rooted in practices of multispecies forced labour and carbon-based extraction” which “rearranged ecologies and economies on a planetary scale” (Haraway, 2015: 162–63). Plantations, she adds, are “machines for turning living beings into resources” under regimes of separation and commodification (161). Malcolm Ferdinand extends this critique seaward: “the plantation has boarded ships and oil rigs, travelling across the Atlantic to organise new oceans of work” (2022: 125). Read through this dialogue, Olivia’s kelp venture becomes a marine Plantationocene, signalling the continuation of extractive logics under the guise of innovation, sustainability, and the tokenization of a woman of colour as its emblem. The narrative critiques these logics by gradually unsettling Olivia’s authority and revealing the ecological entanglements that resist total management. The Plantationocene, then, serves as a critical lens to understand how capitalist modes of extraction persist, though reshaped, in speculative projections of oceanic futures.

The struggle here lies in reconciling the pursuit of a carbon-neutral future with the risk of reverting to production logics reminiscent of colonial exploitation. The compromise presented at the end of the story is a counterintuitive and bittersweet manoeuvre: rather than selling her kelp to biofuel companies, Olivia chooses to sell it to the fossil fuel industry, which may use it to offset emissions. Supporting oil companies in this context paradoxically enables the preservation of the ocean by limiting its exploitation by biofuel corporations. Olivia’s realization that her kelp farm could become entangled in a new form of water imperialism, where greenwashing initiatives mirror the colonial scramble for resources and a plantation logic, reflects Ferdinand’s argument that environmental efforts, when disconnected from anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggles, risk perpetuating oppressive hierarchies. Her fraught decision reveals that genuinely sustainable practices cannot be achieved through a green economy that remains embedded in colonial and profit-driven systems.

The closing novella by Vandana Singh, “The Word for World Is Ocean”, engages with another key aspect of Ferdinand’s concept of decolonial ecology, namely the idea of “decolonial interspecies alliances” (2022: 226). Notably, the title directly echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 novella The Word for World Is Forest, a foundational work of ecological science fiction that critiques imperial violence and environmental exploitation through an allegory of colonial invasion (the Vietnam War). Singh’s adaptation of the title reorients Le Guin’s forested world toward the oceanic, shifting the locus of ecological imagination from terrestrial landscapes to fluid, planetary waters. In doing so, she both acknowledges her intertextual debt to the western science fiction canon and subtly transforms it: the ocean replaces the forest as a space of multiplicity and relationality, where species boundaries and epistemic hierarchies are dissolved rather than merely inverted.

Accordingly, the novella departs from the littoral or amphibian aesthetics that “seem to rely on the liminal geographical and metaphorical site of the beach or coast for [their] constitution” by setting the story on Samudra, a moon almost entirely covered by water (Gui, 2022: 237). In Sanskrit, samudraḥ can be translated as “ocean” or “sea” (Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, 2023). The inhabitants of Samudra, who have adapted to the moon’s harsh environment, use seagrass to regenerate and acclimatize their bodies. Many of these residents are climate refugees from Earth, yet the protagonist, Nissa, was born on Samudra and is fully adapted to its oceanic ecology. The narrative centres on Nissa’s efforts to protect her moon from Shard, a self-proclaimed explorer who epitomizes the colonial adventurer, a figure marked by scientific arrogance, commercial ambition, and taxonomic zeal.

Beyond the storyline involving human characters, Nissa seeks to communicate with the cetaceans that inhabit the vast ocean of Samudra. With clear references to whales, the “cets” are described as her “second family” and have developed a method of communication composed of clicks and whistles, a system that Nissa partially understands (175). As the plot unfolds, Shard, after imprisoning Nissa, attempts to explore the ocean’s depths, an act the protagonist perceives as both a violation and an invasion. During this exploration, an incident occurs aboard the submarine they occupy, and Nissa and Shard are ultimately saved by Amma, a cet from the pod closely bonded with Nissa (181). The scene of the rescue is described as follows:

There was no reason I would have lived to tell this story except for the great matriarch, Amma herself, reaching me just in time, opening her cavernous mouth and drawing me in. I have a vague memory of breathing in complete darkness, gasping, whooping, painful breaths, as I slid about in a wet, warm place. Something was wrong with my ears, but I could smell the comforting aroma of fish, jawahir fruit, and sea vegetation that I associated with the cets. I don’t think I realized then that I was in Amma’s mouth, only that I was inexplicably alive. (198)

Singh’s episode reworks a widespread mythological motif, fostering transcultural connections. Most immediately, it evokes the biblical story of Jonah, who is swallowed by a great fish and later expelled, reborn, and redeemed. Yet Singh departs from this punitive framework: her protagonist is not a reluctant prophet chastised by divine intervention, but a vulnerable human saved through interspecies care. It also more obliquely recalls the Matsya avatar of Vishnu, where a giant fish saves the sage Manu during a cosmic flood, towing his boat to safety and guiding rather than punishing humans (Doniger, 2004: 179–80). Amma, a word meaning “mother” across Dravidian languages, invokes South Indian traditions that personify the ocean as a nurturing maternal presence (Andronov, 2003: 45; Hart, 1999: 173). These layered references recast the marine creature not as a monstrous threat but as a refuge and a collaborator.

Through this intertextual refiguration, Singh enacts what Ferdinand has termed a “decolonial interspecies alliance” (2022: 226), whereby survival is not predicated on human dominance but on mutual recognition between human and nonhuman beings. Amma’s act of sheltering the protagonist within her “wet, warm” body, described in intimate, sensory terms, suggests a mode of kinship that resists extractive logics and reframes the oceanic environment as a nurturing, relational space. Rather than reproduce a familiar arc of guilt and redemption, the narrative privileges connection, care, and co-survival as central to its ecological and ethical vision. The novella, in other words, represents a situation in which humans and nonhumans “form politically strong alliances which, through a sympraxis, an acting with, can oppose the Plantationocene and its slaveries” (Ferdinand, 2022: 226).

Sympraxis is indeed a useful term to describe how the story envisions a collaborative interspecies relationship, where humans and nonhumans jointly engage in shared practices to resist violence and exploitation. Notably, Singh does not reject science outright but reimagines its role within a broader web of ecological and interspecies relations. As Jessica Langer argues, postcolonial science fiction is particularly attuned to the tensions between western technoscientific rationality and Indigenous or spiritual epistemologies, revealing how these competing modes of knowledge can coexist and sometimes merge in acts of creative reworlding (2011: 8). Indeed, the novella suggests the possibility of healing for the antagonist, Shard. After the submarine’s implosion, Shard, too, is saved by Amma and stays on the moon to recover (202–3). Despite his ambition nearly causing both his and Nissa’s deaths, he inadvertently uncovers a secret unknown to the inhabitants of Samudra. In the ocean’s depths, enormous creatures capable of withstanding the heat of underwater lava within submerged calderas function as world-shapers. These beings influence the moon’s geology by creating pillars that eventually form the archipelago known as Kaindra, where Samudra’s inhabitants reside. ³ The story thus stages a convergence of science and myth, initially set in opposition but ultimately presented as coexistent modes of understanding. Furthermore, in a conversation near the end of the story between Nissa and Neel, a linguist and friend of hers, the significance of storytelling and the necessity of its continual retelling are powerfully affirmed:

It is true — we need stories to complete our understanding of things, and we need a range of stories from different perspectives, different tellings. But even that’s not enough for some mysteries. Always, our net of stories is incomplete. When we have new information, we must re-weave the net, tell new stories. (202)

Singh then proposes decolonial interspecies alliances between humans, animals, and plants in ways that break from the colonial and exploitative logics embodied by Shard. Rather than viewing nonhumans as mere resources or commodities, decolonial interspecies alliances call for reciprocity, care, and coexistence. Such alliances aim to reframe environmental stewardship as a communal, participatory act that includes nonhuman knowledge and understanding.

Conclusion

Ecoceanic: Southern Flows reveals the anthology form as a powerful yet ambivalent vehicle for ecological and decolonial engagement. It demonstrates how speculative fiction from the Global South can intervene in conversations about climate change and environmental justice across languages and geographies, even as it remains shaped by the uneven structures of global publishing and translation. This analysis has shown how the anthology, through its thematic focus on oceanic ecologies and its formally open structure, challenges narratives rooted in capitalist and colonial paradigms while also negotiating the constraints of the very systems it seeks to unsettle. Drawing on Malcolm Ferdinand’s concept of écologie décoloniale, Ecoceanic foregrounds the entanglement of colonial exploitation and environmental degradation, extending this critique to the network of relations between humans and nonhumans. Ecoceanic’s open, circulatory structure mirrors the ocean’s dynamic movements, enabling connections across texts, authors, and geographies. This structure invites readers to attend to the overlapping tropes and polyphony of voices within the collection. Yet this coexistence is not free of tension: Ecoceanic functions simultaneously as a vessel for decolonial thought and as a product of global circuits of translation and mediation.

Notably, stories such as Sam Beckbessinger’s “Undercurrency” and Vandana Singh’s “The Word for World Is Ocean”, as analysed here, exemplify these complexities. Beckbessinger’s story exposes the contradictions of “green” capitalism, revealing how projects of sustainable development can replicate extractive logics under new guises. Singh’s novella, by contrast, envisions decolonial interspecies alliances, suggesting that survival depends on recognizing the agency of nonhuman life and on rebuilding relations of reciprocity and care. Both narratives move beyond depicting ecological crisis to imagine practices of coexistence that challenge colonial hierarchies of knowledge and being. In this sense, they echo Ferdinand’s claim that ecological action is also world-making — an imaginative composition of new relationships among humans, nonhumans, and environments.

This redefinition of relation extends to the anthology’s language itself. Through its use of multilingualism and unglossed terms, Ecoceanic performs at a linguistic level what these stories enact thematically: it resists homogenizing translation, disrupts the dominance of global English, and affirms the presence of distinct cultural and epistemic worlds within the same textual space. Yet even this linguistic openness carries its own ambivalence: it resists assimilation while relying on translation and English mediation for its circulation. Ecoceanic, therefore, enacts the very tension that defines the anthology form — between inclusion and dependency, plurality and mediation. Its polyphonic structure and multilingual composition invite readers to imagine decolonial futures grounded in ecological relation, while continually acknowledging the anthology’s own ambivalence, which arises from the very linguistic, editorial, and institutional structures it seeks to transform.