Transoceanic Memory (Studies): Oceans as Mode, Method and Material

Abstract

Abstract There is a renewed interest in scholarship exploring the connection between memory and the environment, remembering and ecocriticism, and between memory cultures and the Anthropocene. Oceanic spaces feature as frameworks to conceptualise this environmental turn across the disciplines, but have not been used to theorise an approach to memory. Taking cue from literary examples from the Anglophone sphere, and building on the work of Paul Gilroy, Isabel Hofmeyr, Michael North and Ananya Kabir, this essay conceptualises transoceanic memory (studies) as a transdisciplinary approach to memory; as mode, method and material. It is mode in its capacity to frame oceans as providing ideational, aesthetic, material and imaginary space to the many processes of remembering, and to reveal relational and exclusionary dynamics inherent to the formation of collective memory. It is method in the manner in which a transoceanic lens offers a comparative framework for transdisciplinary memory studies, allowing for different methods and models of memory to coalesce and communicate. Transoceanic memory is material in the sense in which it relates to oceans as ecosystems, as environmental formations in their own right, and with their own mnemonic agency.