Oceania as Peril and Promise

Abstract

The ocean as a space of planetary interconnection remains riddled with antagonisms of political territorial, and commercial conflict. At the same time, the ocean, figured as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and earthly well-being, could become a means to envision ecological solidarity and worlding concern across the Pacific. To do so, the ocean needs to be re-framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging, mutual interest, and ecopoetic care. The ocean could come to signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a geopolitical danger zone of antagonistic peril: poets and cultural workers affiliated to the remaking of the Pacific into Oceania can help us forge this transnational ecological vision.