4. The Storm

Drexciyology

Detroit electronic band Drexciya, the duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, were anonymous for many years, never performed live but planned to emerge in various places with little notice.1 They performed with other groups, under aliases including the Underground Resistance, Japanese Electronics, Other Peoples Place, Doppler-effect, Akbsact Thought, and Lab Rat XL. What do we make of this Black “aquafuturism” from the Detroit underground but not of it, expressing the science fiction of American apartheid but refusing to be tied down by it. Fiercely anticommercial, refusing big labels, concerts, and tours, Drexciya was committed to making music. Stinson was for some time a long-distance trucker, and perhaps it was in traversing the length and breadth of the United States that he imagined traveling the “aquabahn,” performing “aquajijutsu.” Katherine McKittrick argues that “Drexciya offers anonymity as method and critique” and “a moment of relief,” and that “anonymity—knowing (racial) personalities in advance and centering music and concept—briefly destabilizes the various surveillance systems that mark and make and weigh down black life,” but also that “their unknowability asks what we listen, or try to listen, and perhaps wonder, what unidentified identifications bring to bear on how we engage creative texts.”2

In a rare interview, Stinson says “the basic idea is being spontaneous; . . . load up the equipment and start working; . . . there’s nothing planned, no set course, the mystery of the unknown is basically what makes us tick; . . . it’s like living on the edge with it.”3 He describes Drexciyan albums as “storms” emerging in different places, through work with record labels in different places that might affect different kinds of interventions. He speaks while waiting for Harnessed the Storm emerging with a record label in Portugal. Asked about whether the places conjured by Drexciya can exist here, he responds: “Sorry, no! This planet’s gonna have to be rearranged. . . . Somebody’s gonna have to hit the restart button. . . . Somebody’s opened up the Pandora’s Box and all hell’s breaking loose, so, that’s why I’m pushing the gas, I’m putting out images and things to take people away from here. . . . I’m loading up the Drexciya Arc and [have] a mind to take a trip away from here for a while.”

The elsewhere to which the Drexciya Arc is headed is anywhere but “here,” Detroit, and America. Gramsci was extremely interested in what he saw as the hegemonic apparatus centered on the Dearborn Ford plant near Detroit in the 1920s, a conjuncture that he named “Fordism” in relation to a differently spatialized “Americanism.”4 Stinson speaks from a very different Detroit in the ruins of Fordism. During Gramsci’s decade in prison, Black migration from the South had begun to transform Detroit, but it was from the 1940s that it would do so dramatically, followed by decades of institutionalized racism, capital flight, and urban decay leading up to the late 1960s urban crisis.5 While Gramsci could not have foreseen these transformations, the place of “the Negro” in his diagnosis of Americanism and Fordism remains surprising.

R. A. Judy notes that Gramsci would have been witness to the circulation of Claude McKay’s report on “The Negro Question” at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. Judy reads Gramsci’s notes on the Negro question philologically, noting that, despite their thinness, Gramsci had a preliminary but historical reading of the Negro question as “symptomatic of America as a perpetual and violent pattern of globalizing, coercive transformative power” that tends “toward the consolidation of intelligence into practical political-economic thought”; the Negro fits into these dynamics as “energy converted to capital through absolute coercive force,” and also as a force that might be deployed on the African continent to, “as it were, ‘Negroize’ Africa.”6

Is this formulation, curious as it is, an indication that Gramsci was fundamentally anti-Black, as Frank Wilderson argues in a piece that axiomatically refuses the possibility of a Black Marxism in its first sentence, a kind of death sentence?7 Gramsci’s writes a blatantly anti-Black turn of phrase in a letter from 1931, and in a 1928 letter, he writes with alarm that “Negro music and dancing that has been imported into Europe” finds appeal “to the point of real fanaticism” through its “strong and violent impressions.”8 If our response is not just rejection, we might read Gramsci’s disdain for Black music and dance as Fumi Okiji reads Theodor Adorno on jazz, not as apology, but as a relation between “jazz as critique” and what Fred Moten calls the “insight that Adorno’s deafness carries.”9 We might also read Moten and Stefano Harney’s “undercommons” with Gramsci’s diagnosis of hegemony as a differentiated terrain of struggle; Assata Shakur’s changing perspective during her life underground after leaving the Black Panther Party can be read productively in this light.10 Through this detour, we might read Drexciya as a spatial imagination of and from Detroit’s undercommons, a space of Black musical invention in crisis-ridden millennial Detroit that turns from the undercommons to the undersea.

This takes us to Drexciya’s founding submarine myth, in the liner notes to the 1997 album The Quest, which imagines pregnant African slaves thrown overboard, their babies born underwater, adapting, breathing liquid oxygen. The liner notes ask: “Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed?” Drexciyans seem to answer Edouard Glissant’s call: “Peoples who have been to the abyss do not brag of being chosen. . . . They live Relation and clear the way for it, to the extent that the oblivion of the abyss comes to them and that, consequently, their memory intensifies.”11 McKittrick puts it precisely: “The cosmogony in the liner notes of The Quest provide a redoubled satisfaction: a legible neo-slave narrative that promises a future. But this future, as we know, has not arrived. We are still waiting.”12 And then she listens:

While we wait, I turn to the music itself. I read Drexciya not as necessarily emerging from a narrative of the Middle Passage toward an Afrofuture Aquatopia, but instead as collaborative sound-labor that draws attention to creative acts that disrupt disciplined ways of knowing. To begin, how might one describe lyricless Detroit techno. Andrew Gaerig describes the band’s music as “short tracks of spackled, analog funk . . . offering occasional clues about Drexciya’s sci-fi mystery . . . Wild high-pass filters . . . provide plenty of twine for James Stinson and Gerald Donald to bind their clapping 8o8s . . . Beautiful stylistic diversions . . . A wily slab of electro.” On Harnessed the Storm, I hear fast tin beats atop heavy long-moving-long-shaking baselines that are animated by light green taps. On Harnessed the Storm I hear electronic high hats (spa-spa-spa-spa-spa-spa). I hear hollow echoes and deluge. On Harnessed the Storm I feel bump-trap-boom loss (trap). Isk-isk-crash.13

McKittrick comments on the primary instrument, the synthesizer, which, “as we know, can imitate different instruments: so, the moment of synthesization is about collaboration, borrowing, sharing, removing, and rewriting.” What does it mean that they recorded live? McKittrick answers, “they played live into a predigital analogue recorder. What we are given, as listeners, is synthesized improvisation. They harness the storm and let it go.”14

Shifting to a different medium of Black artistic synthesis, consider the work of Ellen Gallagher, and in particular her 2017 solo show Accidental Records.15 McKittrick says of Gallagher’s engagement with Drexciya: “Gallagher storms us!” Unlike other representations of Drexciyans, McKittrick notes Gallagher’s are “humanoid faces embedded with the leaves of sea plants; she draws attention to underwater life (plants, shells, seaweed, scales, watery circles) that are relational to the few almost-humanoids she details in her work; . . . her undersea Drexciyans are constituted by, part of, within, fused with, and in relation to nonhuman underwater lifeforms.”16

Gallagher is also an oceanic thinker taken by sea stories. She calls her “Watery Ecstatic” series her version of scrimshaw, the carvings seafarers made on whalebone. Tracing part of her ancestry to Cape Verdians who migrated to Rhode Island through whaling ships, Gallagher is intrigued by Moby Dick: “I think of it as an Afrofuturist text.”17 The desire for the destructive whiteness of the whale is at the heart of this enigmatic book. I am drawn to read her “Whale Fall” (from the 2017 Accidental Records exhibition) through C. L. R. James’s reading of Moby Dick as an allegory of the good ship U.S.A. on the precipice of authoritarianism. There are possible routes away from inevitable catastrophe in Moby Dick. Queequeg, the South Sea Islander, offers his bed in queer solidarity to the white-man narrator, as well as, at the end [spoiler alert], his coffin, inscribed with the inscrutable truths of his Indigenous people, a life raft that is also a text that the narrator will never be able to read. And how could he, Ishmael! Pip, the young Black cabin boy falls into the ocean and loses his mind, and Gallagher reads it like this: “It’s like he’s held up by these phantasmagoric terrors. The terror of drowning, the terror of the below you can’t see. It’s this portrait of the Middle Passage. His body has survived, but his mind has not.”18

In “Whale Falls,” other ships seem to rush in to join in the catastrophe. If the “Sea Bed” paintings from the same exhibition look like works of natural history, closer inspection reveals faces folded into shades of brown. Gallagher doesn’t just look over the edge of the boat. In her 2010 “Watery Ecstatic (whale fall),” she stays with the whale carcass as it slowly descends to the ocean floor, where it feeds a large number of organisms.19 Philip Hoare ruminates on this image:

The sun that raised the phytoplankton fed the zooplankton that fed the sand eels that fed the whale. The same cycle sequesters large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, storing it for thousands of years. Men deconstructed whales for their own purposes: to yield oil, heat, and light from animals that lived in the cold dark depths. The human thirst for energy has resulted in a changed climate; the dead whale seems to repair it. There is something angelic in this fall into the darkness.20

But Gallagher’s “angel of history” is Drexciyan. McKittrick is right—she storms us! Melody Jue writes: “The ocean flashes up in the moment of danger that is climate change.”21

A third artist answers the call in a different way: John Akomfrah and his forty-eight-minute, three-channel video installation from 2015, Vertigo Sea.22 The screens juxtapose breathtaking BBC natural-history documentary footage of the oceans, images and text that recall various social and environmental catastrophes, and staged historical reenactments that evoke nineteenth-century Romanticism. A news account demonstrating the dehumanization of African migrant crossings in the Mediterranean initially compelled Akomfrah’s work that then became oceanic, part of a much larger tableau including Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN) revolutionaries thrown into the sea, Argentinian dissidents meeting a similar fate, Vietnamese boat people, the industrial slaughter of whales, an Arctic polar bear hunt, and all of this against the backdrop of the relentless beauty of the sea and of marine life.

Historical reenactments revisit the figure looking out into the sea in contemplation, whether it is the freed Olaudah Equiano who joined an expedition to the Arctic, or Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, or the “water-gazers” looking out from the wharves of Manhattan in the opening pages of Moby Dick. Fragments from Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and Heathcote Williams’s poem “Whale Nation” offer intertitles cutting the contradictory visuals. T. J. Demos writes that the “vertigo” in the film “characterizes the effects of Akomfrah’s geo-historiographic methodology, including its aesthetic function that unleashes uncanny affinities and unconscious relations between Black death and ecocide, . . . further thematized by the footage of Equiano” posing “statically in stylized tableaus, standing eighteenth-century European attire on an unidentified northern coast gazing out at sea;” in one scene he is surrounded by clocks on a beach, in what Demos calls Akomfrah’s “Afro-surrealism.”23 Like Drexciya, this is Black cultural production speaking to imperiled planetarity, and none of the contemplative figures, not even Equiano, offer any consolations.

I have arrived at variations on an oceanic Benjamin alongside the promise of an oceanic Gramsci attentive to traditions of resistance to oceanic capitalism and imperialism.24 With this chorus of Black artist-intellectuals in mind, I suggest that a Drexciyan champions the articulation of critique not by historical reconstruction—unless it is like Akomfrah’s Equiano in eighteenth century garb looking out at the changing Artic ice—but by storming us. Perhaps this helps us read Gramsci’s fitful experiments in historical reconstruction in his prison notes as deliberately forestalled. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, a Drexciyan Gramsci helps us conserve political hope through oceanic circuits that have provoked conceptions of “the strike,” “abolition,” “the international,” and the refusal of planetary ecocide, all of which, in differentiated ways and combinations, conserve the possibility of storming us.

From the Strike to Abolition

To put it differently, it would be a mistake to think of “the strike,” “abolition,” “the international,” and the anti-ecocidal as political ideologies of different times. All these imperatives are still with us. In the terms of our oceanic Gramsci, specific formations of subaltern political will come together in specific conjunctures, activated and are actualized in specific ways, and also sublated in new hegemonic formations that conserve unfinished struggles in different ways.

Consider Marcus Rediker’s classic account of the emergence of the strike through new forms of sociality among seafarers of the eighteenth century: “The coexistence and integration of diverse types of labor, the coordination of efforts to combat a menacing laboring environment, the steady shifts of work as organized by the watch system, and the interdependence of the stages of production combined to produce a laboring experience uncommon to the first half of the eighteenth century. The seaman, in sum, was one of the first collective workers.”25 As a consequence of the slow and steady collective organizing, forged through the specific terraqueous territoriality of the seafarer’s labor regime, British seamen decided in 1768 to “strike” their sails to bring maritime commerce in the pool of London to a halt, and in so doing they joined a motley London working class of weavers, hatters, sawyers, glass grinders, coal heavers and other artisans refusing their wages and working conditions.26 However, this wasn’t the only connotation to striking the sails: for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Greg Grandin argues, the act signified submission to conquerors or to superior ships; Philippe LeBillon adds an important coda that the French affaler, with Dutch/Flemish roots, signifies ships removing or “falling” sails in submission to high winds. For seamen to revolutionize this concept from within the genealogy of seafaring praxis was more precisely a refusal of submission.27 And while “the strike” shifted and resonated in other contexts, as in the mass refusal of Indian lascar to labor as seafarers in 1914, described by G. Balachandran, it has become one of our most potent signs of protest.28

In my own research on Durban, South Africa, a dockworkers’ strike in 1972 spilled out into a seemingly uncontrollable set of strikes across the city, linking university student activists with a new Black student movement that became the Black Consciousness Movement, in a complex and multifaceted urban revolt called “the Durban Moment.” By one account, the dockworkers strike sparked the internal struggle that took various forms through the 1970s and 1980s and that was crucial to the end of apartheid. In one of the neighborhoods that I write about, this was paralleled by a strike wave across the churches, as predominantly women-led congregations imagined taking hold of their religious life as well. There is an archival silence about the oceanic origins of this strike wave in a port city that may have been a key element in the end of apartheid, as well as about the other kinds of strikes it engendered.29

The idea of multiplicity of strikes resonates with the transformations of the strike in our time: the prison strike, often linked to the hunger strike, as at various times in Ireland, Palestine; or Turkey; the feminist strike with Ni Una Menos in Argentina; the student-debt strike in the United States; the George Floyd uprisings as a strike against policing; tenant strikes in various cities; and, still, seafarers strikes and strikes along the commodity chain; airline-workers strikes; logistical strikes like the Amazon warehouse workers strikes during the pandemic.30 Then, there is the idea of the general strike in which all kinds of workers down tools in solidarity to refuse to continue business as usual. The important point is to think about the strike not just as a disruption in the capital–labor relation, but as a disruption of the fiction of the holy “trinity formula.”

The general strike takes us to the question of what comes next: is it what Ruthie Gilmore calls the restoration of capital by using capital to save capital from capital, which takes us back to Gramsci’s heuristic of passive revolution. We now know from a very wide historiography that a multiplicity of labor regimes, forms of tenancy, and types of indebtedness induce a variety of forms of hegemony through the land–labor–money nexus, differentiating people and places in what we now call “racial capitalism” or the differentiated survival of capitalism, its capacity to both absorb and produce social and spatial difference.31 But what does it mean to imagine the end of capitalism, and why is it more unimaginable than the end of the world?

Alberto Toscano argues that “following a leitmotif in Marx’s own writings, echoing a broader communist discourse that exceeds and precedes him, a discourse that Marx did not create ex-nihilo, the major name for this undoing is indeed abolition.” Marx and his contemporaries used the term aufhebung, usually translated sublation in English, but Toscano notes that work from France, including from Lucien Seve and Patrick Theuret, reads aufhebung as overcoming or moving beyond, with an element of conservation, in contrast to the other term Marx and others use, auslöchen, for extinguishing the slave trade or private property. Toscano calls attention to Seve’s translation of aufhebung as depassement, a moving through, before turning to police abolition today with Gilmore as an interlocutor, concluding with Jacques Camatte’s notion of communism as “the resurrection of dead labor.” In another piece that continues this line of thought, Toscano responds to Camette and to Moishe Postone to say that we should resist the temptation to think of capital’s production of sameness without also attending to its production of difference.32

Why does all this matter: because if abolition as aufhebung names a depassement, a moving through in which some things are cancelled and preserved not just in the realm of the ideological but in embodied, material, spatial, and ideological relations, and in the production of sociospatial differentiation, that is exactly what we see in the history of abolition of slavery. When Akomfrah directs a historical reenactment of Equiano after emerging from horrors of the slave trade through abolitionism, looking out at the devastation of the marine world, he literally stages a scene of depassement that pushes us to think beyond to ask what in fact has been abolished and what has not.

This line of thought helps us read W. E. B. Du Bois as fundamentally concerned with the cancelation/preservation of the trinity of land–labor–money relations in the aftermath of slave-based plantation capitalism rather than with a more foundational and Black reconstruction; that is why Black Reconstruction in America culminates in the rearticulation of whiteness as property.33 Kris Manjapra puts it concisely: “When white societies actually began implementing their antislavery ideas, they did so in ways that prolonged and extended the captivity and oppression of black people around the world.”34 Several historical studies have shown us how the discourse of abolition and emancipation was used to extend other kinds of unfree labor, shedding different light on the insights of Marxist agrarian studies on the persistence of differentiated labor regimes.

The other key element of emancipation was that granting reparations to slave owners was a windfall to slave-owning plantation owners who reinvested capital widely, including in slave-based plantations in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba; in plantations reliant on indentured and other kinds of unfree labor in Guyana, Trinidad, Dominica, Honduras, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Australia; in the shipping of indentured laborers across the global plantation belt; and in other kinds of colonial infrastructure including shipping, railways, and finance—in other words, in the sinews of nineteenth century colonial capitalism.35 The failure of “Black reconstruction” also spurred the globalization of Jim Crow. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how, in this process, circuits of expertise invested in limiting democracy worked across what were hoped to be “white men’s countries,” redrawing a global color line.36 Carl Nightingale’s history of urban segregation shows how early experiments in “city-splitting” moved out from colonial Madras and Hong Kong, across the hill stations of colonial Asia, across the Indo-Pacific, and across to South Africa with the bubonic plague as pretext, giving South African cities the opportunity to engage in coercive urban transformation. The key point is that the term segregation spread across languages and contexts, taking different shapes in the long backlash against abolitionism.37

Scholars interested in Black and subaltern intellectuals who became critics of “global Jim Crow” think in the wake of the late Julius Scott’s The Common Wind, which explored the vast, clandestine web of communication across eighteenth-century Caribbean plantation societies and the ways in which revolutionary ideas spread across the sea of islands before and after the Haitian Revolution. Despite the efforts to limit the spread of information, slaves and other subalterns were sometimes better informed than their erstwhile masters; and this is important for any conception of abolition attentive to what remains after the counter-revolutionary offensive sets in.38

Methodologically, Scott pushes us to think as capaciously as possible about the archives of the dispossessed. We might read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives as another powerful response that bridges the furtive intimate lives of Black and queer women just off the margins of the archive.39 We might consider the powerful work of Indian Ocean radical Françoise Vergès, who was once charged with constructing a museum of indenture in her homeland of Reunion Island, which she conceptualized as a museum without objects, for people who did not leave a trace. This unimaginably brilliant idea was of course too radical to actually be implemented.

There are other ways to think of traces of the dispossessed, keeping Drexciya and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic in mind.40 Michael Denning argues that “the audiopoetics of a world musical revolution” forged through the sinews of empire between the onset of electrical recording in 1925 and the Great Depression of the 1930s produced a world of musical communication across “barrios, bidonvilles, barrack-yards, arrabales, and favelas of an archipelago of colonial ports, linked by steamship routes, railway lines, and telegraph cables,” connecting plebian music and dance cultures to an emergent anticolonialism that made possible “the decolonization of the ear and the dancing body” before anything else.41 Denning’s earthy, embodied materialism offers a way of practicing Gramsci’s “earthliness of thought.”

Another fascinating study is Drexciyan in a different way. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s spellbinding The Lost Land of Lemuria traces the transformation of European scientific imaginations of the 1860s as they travelled to Tamil-speaking South India, drawing in a range of figures invested in the fabulation of Lemuria as a lost Tamil continent in the Indian Ocean. Ramaswamy diagnoses the scholarly, literary, visual, and cartographic profusion around Lemuria just as a disenchanted form of colonial geography was becoming commonplace as the ground of critique of the colonial and its aftermath. There is more to the timing of these labors of loss of a prelapsarian and deep-historical Tamil past at the end of empire. They come at precisely at the moment of consolidation of mid-century Tamil nationalism in the wake of the wide-ranging Self-Respect Movement, which in its most radical phase called for the abolition of Brahminism, bonded labor, and priest-mediated marriage, and for the dawn of a new age of mutual respect. The transformation of this movement is another opportunity to think with Gramsci’s heuristic of passive revolution, and to consider varied entailments of the continued investment in Lemuria. Our Drexciyan Gramsci might ask in our time how various subalterns might deploy the fabulation of Lemuria to index ongoing terraqueous dispossession and destruction along the deltas and coasts of the Tamil country.

Oceanic Internationalism and the Refusal of Ecocide

Another concept with a contradictory relationship to the ocean is “the international.” Samera Esmeir argues that international entered the English language in 1789, coined by Jeremy Bentham as a reframing of the “law of nations,” bringing into being a conception of “a distinct legal space for the regulation of inter-space relations.”42 Bentham’s conception of the earth as a two-dimensional surface divided by nations through the tools of geography and cartography was quite different from Hugo Grotius’s conception from his 1609 Mare liberum (The free sea), in which, in Esmeir’s words, “the ocean was indeed a material surface to be traversed (by colonists and merchants.) But it was not only that. It shared its moisture with the skies, the clouds, and the stars. . . . It exceeded human cognition, human calculation. The earth, including its oceans, was not only a surface; it was also the seat of humankind, one planet among others.”43

International as adjective and noun took other travels as well, for instance in the International Workingmen’s Association, for which, Esmeir argues, “the adjective international gained a socialist revolutionary itinerary—one with experiences and horizons of expectation distinct from its juridical itinerary.”44 Although these expectations shifted in the noun form of the First and Second Internationals, expressive of something closer to Bentham’s concept, we should hold onto the possibilities of the revolutionary conception of internationalism as we turn to the oceans at the moment of the Asian African Conference at Bandung in 1995.

Turning to Bandung and the sea, Esmeir begins with Indonesian President Sukarno’s recognition that the oceanic waterways of imperial power were quite literally a poisoned gift in that the “oceans and seas could transform into lifelines of other forms of human horror, domination, and destruction that would affect current and future generations,” and the forms of solidarity proposed by Bandung were precisely a refusal of this inevitability.45 But the anticolonial impulse at Bandung was limited, indeed disciplined, by its commitment to sovereignty, and to the conception of a world produced by international cooperation among decolonized sovereign states. Sukarno was responding to the transformation of the doctrine of the freedom of the seas in the twentieth century as an enabler of European colonization, but without troubling its foundational commitment to the sea, as Esmeir puts it, as “the constitutive cement for staging an enlarged world, . . . a unified world and, more significantly, spatial-political possibilities for capturing it and intervening in it.”46

A new generation of Third World lawyering, including those associated with the movement Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) focused precisely on how the changing approach to the law of the seas privileged some countries’ capacities “to exploit the resource of the sea, to terrorize the world and to destroy the marine environment.”47 In this view, leaving the high seas to the doctrine of freedom of the seas would only continue to privilege imperial powers. The venue for these debates was a series of U.N. conferences leading up to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS.)

The Third World did not always speak in unison in these debates. Surabhi Ranganathan argues that India equivocated on supporting the Latin American demand for limiting natural jurisdiction of the sea bed to two hundred miles, preferring to join a bloc of “margineers,” including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, who argued for a limit of six hundred miles. First world countries were joined by the U.S.S.R. in contesting the demand that the exploitation of the deep sea be conducted through an international body, “the Enterprise”; industrialized states argued that the deep seabed should continue to adhere to the freedom of the seas.48

Despite these contradictions, as a consequence of Third World lawyering, a set of principles were codified into law. Under the first principle, coastal states could declare an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) up to two hundred nautical miles (230 miles); “as long as they did not overexploit living resources”; the second principle declared “the sea bed, ocean floor and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction and consisting in an ‘Area’ that is the ‘common heritage of mankind,’” and that the International Seabed Authority would adjudicate matters in this “Area.”49 Esmeir summarizes the consequence:

If Grotius’s doctrine constituted an enlarged surface of the world for colonial free exploitation, the new doctrine of UNCLOS introduced some limitations on laissez-faire in the form of exclusive economic zones and Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM). Arguably, additional advocacy is required to preserve a more expansive marine environment, including its animate and inanimate lives. Yet under UNCLOS, the limit of this Area, no matter how expansive it will be is the surface of the sea; the commons of humankind is inside the sea. The sea is split into two: one where competing sovereigns can navigate the ocean’s surfaces and project themselves onto them, and another whereto humankind can descend to preserve its heritage (while also failing to counter the destruction of the commons). Crucially, the former is the condition of possibility of the latter in the form of an outer limit; the heritage of humankind in the depths of the sea is conceivable only once its surface has been detached as a distinct but enlarged domain for sovereign states.50

Effectively, this legal structure has sustained sovereignty over the sea, and by extension the power of capital. As Ranganathan clarifies, the division of the seabed and the seawater includes a further complication: “The seabed up to 200 miles may be both the continental shelf and the EEZ of a state, but it is governed solely as the former. Furthermore, unlike in the case of the continental shelf, a state must expressly proclaim an EEZ. Absent such a proclamation, the waters beyond the territorial seas are treated as the high seas, although the bed remains the continental shelf.”51 While the seabed is differentiated from seawater, “‘sedentary’ living resources are placed within the continental shelf regime; . . . they include bottom-dwelling creatures such as clams, oysters, sponges and corals, . . . [as well as] crustaceans, such as shrimps, prawns, lobsters and crabs, even though these can swim”; meanwhile, fish that breed on the seabed are part of the seawater regime, whether as part of the EEZ or the high seas.52

Esmeir asks what was lost in Bandung, if not other ways of being with and traversing the seas, and she turns to the work of Sunil Amrith as a way of tracing formations of oceanic internationalism that do not reinforce sovereignty and capital, and that might confront the struggles necessary to prevent the further poisoning of the seas.

Amrith’s environmental history of the Bay of Bengal connects natural history to the “people’s sea.” He shows how the material infrastructure of life shifts from a “maritime highway between India and China, navigable by mastery of its regularly reversing monsoon winds” to a new regime linking steamships powered by fossil fuels, plantation production fueled by indentured labor, and “imperial laws that both uprooted and immobilized people” in new ways.53 In the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, during the decline of the British Empire, Amrith shows how the Bay of Bengal entered a period of fragmentation of politics, mobility, trade, livelihood, and imagination as well. The era of nation states and intensified development ushered in a new phase of despoliation and destruction of the highly populated littoral of the bay, while networks of interaction were increasingly strained, or indeed destroyed.54

There are hints of a Gramscian attentiveness to an earthly materialism in Amrith’s attention to the effects of industrialization in the bay’s hinterlands, and in the bay itself as “a frontline of Asia’s experience of climate change.”55 The deep ocean and undersea tectonic plates are vital forces, for instance in the undersea earthquake of 2004 that led to the devastating tsunami across various shores. Another major oceanographic process with key sociocultural effects is, of course, the monsoon, and it changed along with coastlines and shorelines in an increasingly heated, fish-depleted, much-trashed sea by the second half of the twentieth century.56

The bay’s fragmentation intensified in the transition to a world of nation states, leading to what Amrith calls “the final enclosure of the Bay—the treatment of the sea as an extension of national territory—[which has] facilitated its overexploitation as a resource.”57 In what has become a familiar oceanic account of plastic detritus, depleted fish stocks, eroding coastlines, and destroyed mangroves, Amrith writes in defense of the “climate refugees” on the edges of the bay. With Esmeir and Gramsci in mind, we can read Amrith’s argument as centered on popular determination of the terraqueous future, picking up on traces of regional sociocultural and material processes, traces left in agrarian ecologies, built environment, and ritual practices.

For instance, Amrith notes shops along the passage to the main shrine in the Tamil town of Nagore selling images of ships to be used in prayer for voyages across the Bay of Bengal.58 Across the bay, in Penang and Singapore, and across Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, and Vietnam, shrines called Nagore Durgah reference their Tamil counterpart. Syncretic public cultures across the bay continue to hold traces of older debates about nationalism, reform, revolution and anticolonial struggle. In our oceanic Gramsci’s terms, these are elements of the past that might yet surface to reconstitute subaltern political will in a regional and internationalist spirit, one hospitable to the stranger, to struggles for social and environmental justice, and to the nonhuman oceanic world that is inextricable from the distinctiveness of the Bay of Bengal.

Esmeir concludes that “what remains of the spirit of Bandung is the act of gathering, of the initiation of collective power and agency,” and that, while this power was effectively captured by sovereignty, it also “manifested the possibility of another collectivity or being-in-common, bringing back forms of life that were once possible.”59 This is what I have also suggested is the Drexciyan capacity to “storm” our time with the imperatives of collective and planetary life.

Today we witness a new kind of race to space, and legal struggles over outer-space resources are fought on a terrain shaped by the ascendance of national sovereignty and territory at sea.60 I have not touched on the many ways in which the question of ecocide is understood today, but key debates center on using capital to save capital from capital, to paraphrase Gilmore again. Ashley Dawson has been writing against initiatives like the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity of 2008, which promotes the marketing of environmental services and the use of offsets to foster “natural capital.”61 He reminds us that extinction is not containable. There is no way to secure islands of ecological diversity in a planetary onslaught by capitalism. The extraction of rents to benefit the few cannot save the conditions for the reproduction of capital itself.

And so, we return in the face of determinate social and natural dangers to an oceanic Gramsci attentive to waves of struggle, to the intensified surfacing of deep contradictions, to waves of passive revolution that attempt to subsume pervasive if differentiated struggles over the conditions of life. As the imprisoned Gramsci speaks to his young son Delio, reminding him to regard the teeming life of the sea, we must refuse just one last ghost-dance of Monseiur le Capital and Madame la terre in order to imagine solidarity with our most fabulous Drexciyan selves who have already learnt how to breathe liquid oxygen, living with the beautiful diversity that is somewhere just beyond the next wave.