Preface and Acknowledgments

In a lucid charge to critique our imperiled present in relation to prior forms of consciousness that also faced human finitude, Aravamudan diagnoses the past and present through a slow unfolding of a determinate future. This temporal structure offers no easy consolations of recuperating prior struggles, no reassurance that the negation of imperial catastrophe is forthcoming, and yet we witness the progressivist hopes bequeathed by the Enlightenment being inexorably undone.1 I add that, in this process of slow decay, Enlightenment legacies reveal their contradictions well out into the horizon as we reach into dangerous waters of the near future to imagine what critique might yet be.

This cautiously recursive structure of thought encapsulates Antonio Gramsci’s lifework, and in particular his political hope against the fascist high tide.2 In a literal sense, the oceanic crisis of our time is planetary, just as the planetary crisis is oceanic, as it links crises bequeathed by waves of capital and imperialism. But these turgid conjunctures of socionatural disaster are also persistent wellsprings of political hope against despair, despite their best attempts not to be. While Gramsci wrote little about the oceans, what he did write recasts his thought in useful ways. With oceanic archives and metaphors, we must therefore venture where no Gramscian has ventured before, remaining faithful to what he calls his philological method, betraying him properly when needs must.

My argument is that an oceanic reading of Gramsci, as a thinker of particular oceanic conjunctures but also as a thinker whose method is “oceanic,” is precisely relevant to imperial extraction through the ocean and to the politics of representation in its wake. Gramsci, as is well recognized, helps us link the critique of capitalism and revolution with insurgent cultural forms in the hope of galvanizing collective political will. The claim in this little book is that he does so “oceanically,” and that his thought can help our quest for post-terracentric explanation and representation as the world ocean warms.

I elaborate this argument in four moves. Chapter 1, “Gramsci and the Sea,” explores what Gramsci has to say about the sea, and also how his leitmotifs or forms of thought can be read oceanically. The “Oceanic Question,” chapter 2, picks up on Gramsci’s “Notes on the Southern Question,” read with contemporary work on oceanic capitalism, agrarian and Black Marxist traditions, and two neologisms: the activist category of “extractivism” and the industry category of “blue economy.” The latter category boldly fetishize the fetishisms of capitalism, which takes us to waves of oceanic imperialism through Fernando Coronil’s critique of Occidentalist forms of thought that divide the Northern (or terrestrial) Self from Southern (or oceanic) Other. Searching for a position beyond terracentrism, we might approach terraqueous articulations of land, labor, and capital through Karl Marx’s critique of the fetishism of this “trinity formula.” Coronil’s reading of Marx, along with his critique of Occidentalism, points to terraqueous critique that refuses “Just One Last Watery Ghost-Dance” (chapter 3) of the reifications of Monseiur le Capital and Madame la Terre. The final chapter, “Storm,” turns to Black Afrofuturist and aquafuturist artists, including the Drexciya collective, Ellen Gallagher, and John Akomfrah, read with Katherine McKittrick, and shows how waves of struggle continue to hold the possibility to “storm” us on different shores. Gramsci’s materialist attention to the sublation—both cancelation and preservation—of prior struggles within hegemonic formations helps us see not just long genealogies of domination, but also of the persistence of the strike, abolition, internationalism, and emergent forms of anti-ecocidal struggle as holding the potential to storm contemporary terraqueous conjunctures. While such political storms are unpredictable and everywhere possible, Gramsci’s caution to revolutionary internationalism is to contribute to the direction of their emergence. This Drexciyan Gramsci, from the ruins of “Americanism and Fordism,” betrays the Sardinian properly, taking his thought to undercurrents necessary to will an actually different future into being.

The oceanic past is never past, but it will never return. We might take some solace in the conclusion of Moby Dick, in which the narrator floats in the aftermath of catastrophe in the coffin of the great harpooner and his erstwhile lover Queequeg, a coffin inscribed with the truths of Oceania that remain inscrutable to the narrator. In other words, Ishmael lives to tell the tale, but without the ability to comprehend, let alone claim, Indigenous knowledge in response to planetary crisis. Even that gesture remains ruined. Instead, as Gallagher and Charne Lavery remind us, it is Pip, the young Black cabin boy who is drowned but not quite saved, who can never unsee the madness in the ocean. Pip is the Gramscian organic intellectual of the oceanic crisis, the Drexciyan who refuses the second coming of a Marxish messiah but who faces the apocalyptic nightmares that return after the conclusive eclipse of the Enlightenment. And this is precisely the point at which the oceanic Gramsci returns to the radical traditions of the shipwreck, with Pip and political hope. A tragic scene, indeed. In our age of resurgence of deep socionatural forces, as centuries of oppression find new expressive articulation, scenes like these have the capacity to storm us in ways we cannot yet anticipate.

This book is experimental. I invite readers to dissent, to refuse anything and transform everything. I am grateful for the opportunity to have had brilliant interlocutors at the Summer School in Global Studies and Critical Theory on “the Sea” at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory, University of Bolgona, in late June of 2022, with support for my participation from the Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna. I thank the brilliant seminar participants, as well as Sarah Nuttall, Ranjana Khanna, Sandro Mezzadra, Iain Chambers, Antonio Schiavulli, Achille Mbembe, Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Laleh Khalili, Gillian Hart, Matthew Shutzer, Rosanna Carver, Michael Watts, Philippe LeBillon, Alex Loftus, Jesse Rodenbiker, Asher Ghertner and participants at his graduate seminar at Rutgers, and an insightful referee. Samera Esmeir shared work in progress that influenced key arguments. Grant Farred offered the playful provocation that Gramsci is too important to be left to the Gramscians. Katherine McKittrick and Ellen Gallagher make Drexciyology and scrimshaw for us all. Leah Pennywark has been wonderfully supportive from our first interaction. Gratitude to the team at Minnesota, including Anne Carter and Mike Stoffel, for all that brings a little book into the world. Thanks to many colleagues and friends at Berkeley and at the Department of Geography, and also for a Humanities Research Fellowship and for a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. Many friends across many seas offer all manner of support; I hope they see themselves between the lines. As always, thanks to Ma, Pa, Arvind, Jeannie, Nikhil, and Maya. Ismail remains my light and lifeboat.