Blue Ecology and Resistance

Abstract

This chapter addresses water and its indelible relationship to life forms. Earth is a blue planet: water comprises more than two thirds of the earth’s surface, and our body mass. Blue, for all its water and life-giving associations, is a melancholy color, a hue of sadness. Reading Blue, then, in terms of a blues ecology provides a nuanced framework for considering an African diasporic perspective. In that way, a blue/blues ecology is employed as a framework for theorizing survival and trauma, and physical and psychological dislocations. Specific attention will be paid to islands, swamps, and shorelines as sites of resistance in Tar Baby and Love. These ecotones are liminal spaces where aquatic and terrestrial frontiers meet, and where past and present and human and nonhuman ecosystems encounter and integrate.