Beyond the Shore: Blue Humanities, Colonial Memory, and Ecological Imagination in Contemporary Island Fiction

This paper examines the emergence of the Blue Humanities as an interdisciplinary framework that re-centers the ocean as a critical site of cultural production, historical memory, and ecological imagination. The study advances Katie Ritson’s idea of “seeing from the sea” to suggest an oceanic comparative method based on mobility, relationality, and decolonial epistemologies, challenging land-based and nation-bound paradigms. The study examines how literature and film depict the sea as an agent and archive of colonial encounter, Indigenous knowledge, and climate precarity, drawing on theoretical interventions by Smith and Mentz, Hau‘ofa, Sharpe, and DeLoughrey.

The study illustrates the conflicts between global commodification and local narrative sovereignty through case studies of international and Indigenous-centered movies, such as Moana and Whale Rider, as well as comparative readings of Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean literatures. By highlighting rising seas as a location of “slow violence” and cultural resiliency, it further situates oceanic storytelling within the climate humanities. In the end, the paper presents the ocean as a methodological lens and a moral horizon for humanities scholarship in the twenty-first century, arguing for an inclusive, decolonial Blue Humanities that incorporates pedagogy, representation, and environmental ethics.