Transcultural Blue Humanities and Planetary Relationality in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures and Films
This PhD project investigates the emergence of what I call blue planetary poetics in the twenty-first century. Across vast regions, literatures and films are created that mobilise the aquatic for their expressions of relations. Juggling the complexities of our time, these texts question concepts of separation and exclusion and instead view the planet as an organism of extreme entanglement and water as a crucial component of such. The theoretical framework of the thesis combines several research areas: Transcultural, Planetary and World Anglophone Studies and the Blue Humanities. A diverse selection of 12 works of art is analysed, whereby transcultural currents and subthemes such as aquatic time, petroculture, marine mammals and queer ecologies are explored. The reading of the material is based on a transcultural practice that accounts for the network of imaginations that connects the texts, while the corpus is analysed in a way that allows for a direct comparative reading of examples from around the world. The thesis is based on the assumption that blue planetary poetics have multidirectional significance for the field of World Anglophone Studies and beyond for humans and morethan-humans, as the planet becomes a relational unit of reference.