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A word cloud of Karin Ingersoll's "A Seascape Epistemology" (2016)

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A word cloud of Karin Ingersoll's "A Seascape Epistemology" (2016)

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This book was the favourite I read for my qualifying exam, and revisited for the Methodology Plan. I hope to be able to develop a Mauritian (Kreol Morisien) vocabulary of ocean epistemologies and ontologies.

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Bao Nguyen - Grad. Admin Comparative Literature

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Karin Amimoto Ingersoll's lecture, February 24, 2018

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I came across Alexis Pauline Gumbs recently, and cannot wait to have some time over the holidays to read this book.

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Books and Publishing

In a starred review of Dub: Finding Ceremony, Publisher's Weekly calls Alexis's writing "groundbreaking." Bitch Magazine calls her "a literary treasure" and luminaries from the North Carolina State Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green to Alice Walker have praised the bravery and incisiveness of her work. What her communities know is that Alexis's work functions as oracle, balm and sacred space for those who are traditionally excluded from narrative and institutions of knowledge. With Alexis's writing books function as portals for expansive practices. Her texts on Black Feminism, mothering, futurism and imagination are currently in use in Black feminist classrooms, environmental strategy sessions, Afro-futurist afterschool programs, contemporary art museums, community healing spaces and more. Alexis's work is the inspiration for operas, contemporary dance works, gallery installations, and performances across the world. Learn more about Alexis's books below.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of "vision" and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

Undrowned in Practice is a digital immersive space to practice these Black feminist lessons together. Learn more or sign up here.

Praise for Undrowned

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs breaks the surface of living as human and deep dives the depths of life in the planet's oceans, where human life began but is now a danger to. Gumbs's riveting, loving, genre-bending embrace of marine mammals and the human peril facing them, her mammal love, charges us to rethink and re-behave what it means to be human as she reminds us humans are mammals too, all life is sacred. On every page, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers us a new definition of philosophy, a new definition of evolution. If we truly want a more just way of living, of being interspecies. This is a smart, black feminist, queer poetic; a love evangelist trouble making abolitionist offering. Take it. And be the change." ―Alexis DeVeaux, author of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

"This book is a devotional. An invitation to live more intentionally, more in harmony/Aligned.In this book, the Divine Mermaid, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, dives inside the wails of the Ancestors as she gives testament and testimony to the brilliance of Knowing Spirit beyond the veils of time, place and embodiment. Here, Alexis serves as guide and translator of vibrational realities of dreaming into how to survive, thrive and shape shift this world."―Sharon Bridgforth, Doris Duke Performing Artist

The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

Praise for Dub:

"Grounded in oríkì-like references to Sylvia Wynter's oeuvre, Dub simultaneously contracts and expands to create a new form of proprioception, which allows us as a species, phantomed by the corrosive and lacerating actions of history, to locate ourselves in relation to other species, as well as within the time-space continuum of the yet to be, the now and the 'past.' Part prayer, oration, exhortation, commentary and story, Dub amplifies ancestral voices to become mythopoesis in the making." - M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!

"Offering a sweeping, thoughtful, and exquisite meditation on Sylvia Wynter's work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic engagement represents a new and unique way of encountering and paying homage to Black feminist theory and Black feminist theorists. A beautiful and graceful text, Dub will inspire readers to return to and to rethink Wynter's work and her place within African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Black feminist studies." - Lisa B. Thompson, author of Single Black Female

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure."

The second book in an experimental triptych, M Archive is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following the worldwide cataclysm we are living through now. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

Video: Recap of M Archive performance created by Artists in Twin Cities, MN

"Like Audre Lorde, Gumbs writes for the complexity of her vision."

Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity is a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

Video: Alexis and Dr. Spillers have a conversation with a live audience.

"Revolutionary Mothering is juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and very brave."

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and '80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, move beyond individual narratives of choice toward collective solutions, live for more than ourselves, and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

Video: An episode of the Laura Flanders Show with Revolutionary Mothering editors & contributors

Contributions...

The following are a sampling of books, journals, magazines, newspapers and other media that have contributions by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

"Evidence"

Alexis's contribution to Octavia's Brood is titled "Evidence". The story looks back from a future eutopia to the past seen as dystopia in a period called "Before Silence Broke," with the period "Breaking the Silence" seen as the beginning of the changes that brought about the eutopia. The eutopia is an open society where everyone is encouraged to develop in their own unique way.

in Octavia's Brood

edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

"Evidence" is a moving experiment in form, hopeful and a little heartbreaking. It contains too many beautiful lines to quote..."

"Sweetness of Salt:
Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes)"

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good includes a contribution from Alexis titled "The Sweetness of Salt: Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes)" which is an "offering and gratitude of Toni Cade Bambara, not through her texts but through my personal witness of the impact her self-identified students, loved ones, mentees, and collaborators." The tributes include Cheryll Greene, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Cara Page, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Kai Barrow.

in Pleasure Activism

written and gathered by Adrienne Maree Brown

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In a starred review of Dub: Finding Ceremony, Publisher's Weekly calls Alexis's writing "groundbreaking." Bitch Magazine calls her "a literary treasure" and luminaries from the North Carolina State Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green to Alice Walker have praised the bravery and incisiveness of her work.

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More on her recent book

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UNDROWNED--BLACK FEMINIST LESSONS FROM MARINE MAMMALS-- ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS & ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN

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Inspired partly by recent affirmations of ocean ontologies and seascape epistemologies from the Pacific, as well as the social construction of the ocean, ocean mobilities and embodied experiences of the ocean

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This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, 'flat' ontologies. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. In this paper we contend that such approaches are still somewhat lacking. The vertical element of volume is all too often abstract and dematerialised; the emphasis on materiality that is typically used to rectify this excess of abstraction tends to reproduce a sense of matter as fixed and grounded; and the temporality that is employed to reintroduce 'motion' to matter has the unintended effect of signalling a periodised sense of time that minimises the chaotic underpinnings and experiences of place. We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation, and that a 'wet ontology' can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits.

References

Barry, A , 2014, "A new geologic epoch? Tracing the political geography of the Anthropocene", lecture given at colloquium at Geographisches Institut, Universität Zürich, April, copy available from the author.
Google Scholar

Elden, S , 2013b, "Earth", lecture delivered at the CityState Lexical-Political Workshop, Tel Aviv, 23 June, audio recording, http://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/earth-citystate-workshop.mp3.
Google Scholar

Elden, S , 2013c, "Undermining geopolitics: Sea, seabed, ice", lecture delivered at the ArcticNet conference, Halifax, NS, December, audio recording, http://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/arcticnet-undermining-geopolitics.mp3.
Google Scholar

Elden, S , 2013d, "Geo-metrics", lecture delivered at the workshop on Regimes of Calculation and Global Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, ON, 19 September, audio recording, http://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/geo-metrics-talk-at-balsillie.mp3.
Google Scholar

Grundy-Warr, C, Sithirith, M, Yong, M, forthcoming, "Volumes, fluidity, and flows: Rethinking the 'nature' of political geography" Political Geography doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.03.002.
Google Scholar

Peters, K , forthcoming, "Drifting: Towards mobilities at sea" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series doi: 10.1111/tran.12074.
Google Scholar

Schmitt, C , 2014 Land and Sea (Counter-Currents, San Diego, CA), http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/03/carl-schmitts-land-sea-part-1/.
Google Scholar

Steinberg, P E , 2011c, "The Deepwater Horizon, the Mavi Marmara, and the dynamic zonation of ocean-space" The Geographical Journal 177 12-16.
Google Scholar

Steinberg, P E , 2014, "Volume, depth, and the (in)visibilities of water", http://philsteinberg.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/volume-depth-and-the-invisibilities-of-water/.
Google Scholar

Weizman, E , 2002, "Introduction to the politics of verticality" Open Democracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp.
Google Scholar

Yusoff, K , 2013, "Geologic life: Prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 779-795.
Google Scholar

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Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking - Philip Steinberg, Kimberley Peters, 2015

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This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, 'flat' ontologies.

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A play by Alanna Mitchell - on destruction and hope regarding the fate of the oceans and the planet. We were fortunate she came to Guelph in late 2018. I think it was a very interesting arts-based way of relaying the anxiety of climate change.

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TEDxCalgary - Alanna Mitchell - Sea Sick: Ocean in Crisis

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The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology

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The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology

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(Peters and Steinberg, 2019)

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This article builds upon previous assertions that the ocean provides a fertile environment for reconceptualising understandings of space, time, movement and experiences of being in a transformative and mobile world. Following previous articles that urged scholars to adopt a 'wet ontology', this article presents a progression of, and a caveat to, these earlier arguments. As we have argued previously, liquid 'materiality, motion, and temporality allows for new ways of thinking that are not possible when only thinking with the land'. This article maintains that critical perspectives can be gained by taking the ocean's liquidity to heart. However, it also questions the premise of this vision. For the ocean is not simply liquid. It is solid (ice) and air (mist). It generates winds, which transport smells, and these may emote the oceanic miles inland. Although earlier attention to the ocean's liquid volume was a necessary antidote to surficial static ontologies typically associated with land, this is insufficient in light of how the ocean exceeds material liquidity. This article thus explores what might emerge if, instead, one were to approach the ocean as offering a more-than-wet ontology, wherein its fluid nature is continually produced and dissipated.

References

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The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology - Kimberley Peters, Philip Steinberg, 2019

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This article builds upon previous assertions that the ocean provides a fertile environment for reconceptualising understandings of space, time, movement and experiences of being in a transformative and mobile world. Following previous articles that urged scholars to adopt a 'wet ontology', this article presents a progression of, and a caveat to, these earlier arguments.