Oceanic Freedom: Romances of Fluidity in Douglass, Delany, and Contemporary Theory

In a similarly vein, Cristin Ellis examines how the fluidity of the ocean environment leant itself to models of natural freedom in the fictions of Douglass and Delany, and asks how their romantic-era trope of a moralized... [ view full abstract ]

In a similarly vein, Cristin Ellis examines how the fluidity of the ocean environment leant itself to models of natural freedom in the fictions of Douglass and Delany, and asks how their romantic-era trope of a moralized climate may survive in today’s ontologically-oriented critical theory. Her "Oceanic Freedom" looks at analogous scenes in Douglass's "Heroic Slave" and Delany's Blake in which a maritime slave uprising is echoed by the advent of a powerful ocean storm, and where this impersonal climatic violence is taken as evidence that slavery runs counter to a freedom that is endemic to the mutable order of material nature. Ellis uses the figuration of material fluidity as freedom in these two of the earliest works of African American fiction to trace the Romantic-era racial scientific assumptions that underlie this association. She then turns to critically reconsider a similar faith in the emancipatory tendencies of material fluidity in the work of a number of contemporary theorists in order to suggest the Romantic inheritances that may still inform work in new materialism and the “blue humanities” today. 

In attempting to discern a possible albeit always elusive world of corals, reefs, and heaps, "America's Marine Poetics" refuses to take the oceanic as a mere metaphor for shapelessness. Instead, we read the aquatic element as the literal ground of life's formation and as the very model for unorthodox ways of doing politics.