White in the Deep Blue

Abstract

Abstract Although the imperial ship has been a key location through which to theorize colonialism and the origins of racial capitalism, little research exists on the postcolonial ship as an analytical indicator for the persistence and distinctiveness of contemporary racial capitalism. This article explores a largely uncharted territory through a critical appraisal of postwar Greek-owned shipping. Greece's dominant place in global shipping offers an illuminating and yet understudied entry point to political economies of neocolonial / racial capitalism at sea. The first part of this brief intervention invokes the Greek-owned tanker in threefold ways: as a geopolitical actor in response to the decolonization of maritime energy routes and to worldmaking at and through the sea; as a floating financial device that produces deterritorialized hierarchies of global space through processes of flagging-out and offshoring; and as a physical site where structures of racial capitalism, mainly in terms of labor, proliferate. The second part of the article discusses certain forms of community waters’ defense as a possible path toward decolonization and Indigenous efforts to “take sea back.”