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Submersing ourselves, descending rather than transcending, is essential lest our tendencies toward Human exceptionalism prevent us from recognizing that, like our hermaphroditic, aquatic evolutionary ancestor, we dwell within and as part of a dynamic, intra-active, emergent, material world that demands new forms of ethical thought and practice. Turning to charismatic megafauna such as cetaceans (Bryld and Lykke Huggan), the phenomenology and materiality of submerged bodies (Alaimo Neimanis), the haptic “fingeryeyes” of nonhuman others (Hayward), and even the visuality and materiality of seawater (Jue Mallon Andrews), 4 this body of work argues specifically for a kind of submergence under the sea as an ethical engagement with our nonhuman others. The ocean is often represented as a nonhuman, nonhabitable place that nevertheless is domesticated, militarized, touristed, exoticized, and rendered anthropomorphic. Thus the oceanic turn has much to do with the Anthropocene crisis of the world ocean and is interwoven with narratives of extinction, apocalypse, alterity, and precarity. 3 More recently, Hurricane Dorian ravaged Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands, an unprecedented catastrophe that is becoming an all too common occurrence in the region. In fact, while we were writing this article, scientists announced that the oceans have warmed 40 percent more than predicted by a United Nations report as recently as 2014 and that 2018 registered the hottest average ocean temperatures on record (as did each of the last ten years). There is now a rich maritime grammar developing across the disciplines as scholars examine the ocean as a space of transnational capital and shipping, of plastic waste and regimes of disposability, as a visible marker of climate change, and as an agent in sea level rise and in environmental crises ranging from tsunamis and hurricanes to coral bleaching and ocean acidification.

It has become less of an inert backdrop to cross over, and more a figure and a material to fathom, to sound, and to descend beneath. 2 In these circles at least, the ocean is no longer “the forgotten space”-to borrow from Allan Sekula-of global capitalism and modernity. Twenty-first-century work has been turning to the sea itself, sounding the depths of “blue-green capitalism” (Helmreich), “wet ontologies” (Steinberg and Peters), “sea ontologies” (DeLoughrey), and the “aqueous posthumanism” (Alaimo) of the “more-than-human hydrocommons” (Neimanis). The majority of the maritime scholarship of the last century has focused on the mobility of (male) transoceanic agents across often feminized fluid space. This spatial turn has been given various names such as the blue humanities, the oceanic humanities, and critical ocean studies 1 and ranges across disciplines such as anthropology, geography, literature, and feminist and queer studies. The environmental humanities-with its interdisciplinary, multispecies, feminist, and materialist currents-has generated a lively new body of work concerned with theorizing the ocean, not as blank space or aqua nullius for human agents to cross but rather as a viscous, ontological, and deeply material place, a dynamic force, and an unfathomable more-than-human world.

René Depestre, “Mère caraïbe ” (Caribbean Mother), translated by Anita Sagátegui The authors consider the work of artists Tony Capellán, Jean-Ulrick Désert, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nadia Huggins, and David Gumbs. Building upon the 2017 exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, curated by Tatiana Flores, this article expands the conversation from the archipelagic to the submarine, engaging “tidalectic” representations of underwater bodies through ontologies and aesthetics of diffraction. The authors’ work turns the visual focus from the surface to the depths, engaging with the Caribbean Sea and contemporary artists who depict a gendered oceanic intimacy and aesthetics of diffraction and submergence. This work generally focuses on a universalized ocean (as nonhuman nature) rather than a geographically and culturally specific place (as history). Recent scholarship in the blue humanities, or critical ocean studies, has turned to the mutable relationship between human bodies and the ocean, shifting from depictions of a seascape across which human bodies attain agency to considering the experience and representability of sea ontologies, wet matter, and transcorporeal engagements with the more-than-human world.

Underwater bermuda photosphere google maps