Dr Michael Paye (University of Warwick, IASH Fellow)
please click here to access the talk.
Fish, Oil and World Literature
Oceanic perspectives invite different outlooks to those rooted in the land. Meg Samuelson sees ‘Coastal form’ as a shared aesthetic, formal, and narrative mediation of ‘a worldview informed by a coastal vantage point that manifests thematically and stylistically across genre, nation, and language’. In my own approach to oceanic comparativism, I seek a framework for reading novels based at regional fisheries in relation to Atlantic fishery collapse and oil boom that can move fluidly between inshore, coastline, and delta.
Taking an approach inspired by world-ecology, world literature, and blue humanities studies, this talk articulates how the recurrence of fishery collapse has contributed to shared sensibilities, as well as literary forms and aesthetics, that manifest across a range of Atlantic novels. By comparing depictions of core North Atlantic fisheries to the disavowed traditional fishing culture of the Niger Delta, I will outline an emerging structure of feeling that maps out an Atlantic-wide rejection of capitalism as a way of organising nature.