As part of a longer project on sea edges and coloniality, this essay studies ways of being that exceed the human, nonhuman, and colonial divide, and that find historical nodes of power and affective density at the boundaries of the Americas oceanic.[1] It does so by
thinking with and alongside the work of environmentalist and writer Rachel Carson and multimedia mestiza artist Cecilia Vicuña to find sources for ecological feeling, connectivity, and praxis across the hemisphere. Their views have shaped my own understanding of ecological memories and how the surround has shaped a way of being and living at the sea’s edge.
In the midst of the Anthropocene’s destructiveness, how can we theorize sea edges as places of coloniality, conquest, encounter, financial speculation, yet also as sites of hidden imaginaries and potentiality, and even sites of ongoing resource resurgence and individual and collective resilience?[2] What can we take from Rachel Carson’s view despite knowing it is steeped in the settler logic and scientific gaze of Western domination of the natural world? How does Cecilia Vicuña’s visual art and performance offer a form of decolonial play that exposes extractive capitalism and also finds sources for living otherwise? Thinking from the liminal and harsh pounding spaces of the sea’s edge is one way to consider the beautiful and terrible current condition of planetary existence. Attuning our attention to a historical grounding of place and to the global ecologies of the sea is requisite for producing action and for unspinning the network of colonial-capital relations. Rachel Carson peers into tidepool communities and is able to name the fragile and resilient condition that exists at the sea’s edge. Yet without Cecilia Vicuña’s attention to the Global South, to extractive industries, and to the buried and omitted Indigenous histories in the Americas, we risk reproducing our fascination with the ocean and its sea edge without a tethered sense of the colonial Anthropocene. Both of their forms of encounter and observation have profoundly influenced the sea edge epistemology I begin to outline here.[3]
Text by Macarena Gómez-Barris
OPEN RIVERS / ISSUE THIRTEEN: SPRING 2019
https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/life-otherwise-at-the-seas-edge/
