Mining the seas: Speculative fictions and futures
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| Abstract |
This chapter makes two provocative claims: first, that the turn to what is being called the “blue humanities,” while certainly is driven by our environmental crisis and the ecological turn in scholarship, is also the product of the neoliberalization of academia. Second, that while there is certainly a contemporary scramble for mineral rights and access to the seabed by transnational mining conglomerates, the oceanic turn in capitalism and scholarship seems to be an answer to the need for an intellectual and material “spatial fix.” The chapter places these claims in relationship to a critical genealogy of the oceanic humanities and to current discourses around the “blue economy” that demonstrate the circulatory nature of the intellectual currency and fluidity of ideas and extractive capitalism. This is demonstrated in a reading of the XPRIZE science-fiction contest, an attempt by extractive industries like Shell Oil to develop an extractive imaginary for the future of deep-sea mining. |
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