This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.

Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations

This special issue aims to explore the postcolonial ocean and the concerns it raises —ranging from environmental justice and oceanic pollution to the fallouts of extractive industries —particularly in the case of the Indian Ocean, which has long borne witness to colonial aggression, postcolonial resistance, and the neocolonial ambitions of neoliberal actors. While the ocean is reckoned to underscore an ‘oceanic deficit’ in traditional ecocritical thinking (Dobrin 2021), it has also been framed as a method for engaging with the complex fluidities that shape human cultural histories alongside their nonhuman counterparts (Menon 2022).

This special issue invites submissions that focus on literary and cultural representations of the Indian Ocean exclusively from postcolonial perspectives. It intends to explore the intersections between Blue Humanities and South Asian literature and culture in the postcolonial context, emphasizing how the Indian Ocean serves as a site of memory, mobility, and ecological imagination and a living witness to the clashes between power and resistance. The Indian Ocean has long been a postcolonial space of cultural confluence, marked by centuries of transoceanic exchanges, imperial encounters, and environmental shifts. However, scholarly engagements with the ocean within South Asian studies remain limited compared to Atlantic and Pacific studies (Hau’ofa 1993, Santos 2020).

This special issue aims to bridge this gap by foregrounding literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of the Indian Ocean within a blue postcolonial framework which refers to an epistemic fusion between postcolonial thinking and blue humanities thinking. It seeks to examine how South Asian literary and cultural narratives engage with the themes of deep sea infrastructure, overfishing, industrial fishing, trawling, mining, extinction of deep-sea lifeforms, capitalism-backed extraction industry, habitat loss, microplastics, ocean noise, oceanic affects, the rise of the blue economy—all of which continue to influence the conditions and coordinates of blue postcoloniality.

This issue invites submissions on topics that include but are not limited to:

• Postcolonial ocean and neoliberalism
• Blue economy, blue infrastructure, and blue media
• Oceanic disaster, pollution, and slow violence
• Ocean as archive, method, and spatial metaphor
• Indigenous narratives, coastal ecology, and interconnectedness
• Oceanic imagination, decoloniality, and postcolonial restructuration
• Blue humanities, non-human, and ocean as the other
• Oceanic resistance, resilience, and climate justice

Submission Instructions

Submission Instructions 
Abstracts of 150 words (excluding a 100-word bio note) and containing no more than five keywords should be submitted to the editors by 31 December 2025: Dr. Abhisek Ghosal, Dr. Ritam Sarkar, and Dr. Sidney I. Dobrin, at bhspecialissue@gmail.com. Selected submissions will be notified by January 2026. Finished article drafts of 6,000–8,000 words (including references) will be due by 30 November 2026. Advanced enquiries are welcome.

• Articles (including references) need to be prepared, strictly following the submission guidelines of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
• Articles strictly complying with the objectives and aims of the CFP shall be given full consideration during the screening process.
• Expected publication of the full issue is 2027
• Initially, abstracts will meticulously be reviewed by the guest editors in consultation with the special issue editor of the journal. Irrelevant submissions will be screened out. Shortlisted contributors will be invited to submit their full articles. Final acceptance of the articles depends on the feedback of the anonymous reviewers and the special issue editor.