Ocean Echoes in the Global South: Seismic blasting, Whale Songlines and Revolutionary Praxis

Abstract

Seismic blasting of fossil-fuel rich geological strata chokes the ‘life force’ (Wanambi, 1990, 105) of oceans that wash the shores of settler colonial Australia, postcolonial India and post-apartheid South Africa. I argue, however, that energetic waves of feeling, sacred storytelling, coalition-building and activism have the capacity to arrest plunder, agitate cross-border state-corporate collusions and oxygenate planetary suffocation. I therefore ask: How can energetic waves or modes of ocean activism that emerge from the Global South travel in ways that might amplify a revolutionary praxis that is human, more-than-human, oceanic, transoceanic and planetary. My thoughts on revolutionary praxis in the Global South, in particular settler colonial Australia, are sparked by Larrakia Sea Country, Yolgnu oceanic philosophies, Gunditjmara-led rallies/ceremonies and youth-led School Strikes for Climate Change in Australia. The paper engages with the ‘oceanic turn’ and the ‘decolonial turn’ in geography, but also radical Indigenous, Black, Brown, Southern and feminist intellectual traditions that offer possibilities for revolutionary thought and action that composes “dream books of existing otherwise” (Hartman 2019, xiv) with the planet. My engagement with these intellectual traditions values the agitation of thought amid dehumanisation, trauma, racial injustice and inequality in the ‘many souths’ of the world that include settler colonial Australia, my ‘home’ in postcolonial India and post-apartheid South Africa. Transoceanic revolutionary praxis is urgent given that Indigenous, Black and Brown worlds in the Global South show the duress of intolerable burdens of climate change and extinction that failed to be addressed by western institutions with colonial intellectual legacies.