Special Session at MLA 2024 in Philadelphia, January 4-7, 2024
How might we better understand colonialism, and ways of being and knowing against or outside of it, by foregrounding the maritime: oceans, sailing, ports, cargo, navigation, crews, shoals, shipwreck, piracy? “Water is the first thing in my imagination,” writes Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return: “I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way” that “had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea.” Following Brand’s method, the gambit of this roundtable is that approaching colonialism via the sea can help us see it better and imagine paths past it.