Submersive Mermaid Tales: Speculative Storytelling for Oceanic Futures

Abstract

In the context of climate change and sea-level rise, the blue humanities have high stakes in telling captivating and persuasive stories that illustrate the intimate connections between human bodies and ‘bodies of water’ (Neimanis, 2017, p. 1). Part of this work lies in a shifting of onto-epistemological boundaries to see bodies as porously and permeably embedded within environments, leaking into each other in a way that is posthuman and trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2014, p. 190). Another part lies in coming to terms with the oceans’ abiding histories of empire and slavery, toxicity and global capitalism. However, even as our history is inundated with it and our existence depends on it, the ocean is, as Stefan Helmreich (2009, p. ix) so concisely puts it, ‘strange’. Unlike earth, it is an alien realm that resists direct experience and knowledge and prohibits humans from visiting on our own terms. Surfers, swimmers, sailors and divers have their own embodied ways of knowing the sea, but for most humans the ocean is a highly mediated environment that requires translation through cinema, documentary, photography, literature or poetry in order to become accessible for more than surface-level thought, emotion and concern (Alaimo, 2014, p. 191). The shape of these stories matters for imagining multispecies futures, and many have moulded themselves around ideas of otherness, danger, transcendence and use—giving us the ocean as alien, as stranger, as sublime nature and as resource and conduit for transnational capital and empire.