In Blue Ecocriticism, Sydney I. Dobrin provocatively calls for viewing “oceanic deficit” as form of “disciplinary critique” (9) in order to open up the epistemic realm of ecocriticism which primarily deals with the representation of ecological substance in literary and cultural works. Dobrin’s idea of blue ecocriticism is not just only an epistemic extension of ecocritical thinking to the deterritorial becomings of the oceans but works as an intellectual impetus to scholars, encouraging them to posit land-centric ecocritical thinking to what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘plane of exteriority.’ Whereas Dobrin calls for reviewing the human interactions with the oceans under the epistemic lens of blue ecocriticism, Dilip Menon insists that there is an urgent need to employ ocean as method to get into the complex fluidities of the oceans, which plays a massive role in conditioning transformative co-becomings human cultural histories in tandem with nonhuman counterparts. Steve Mentz in An Introduction to Blue Humanities calls for working out blue humanities perspectives to look into watery ways of forging transcorporeal connectivities across human and nonhuman worlds. Needless to mention, the Indian Ocean plays an instrumental role both in letting colonial rulers navigate oceanic routes to subject distant lands to colonial manoeuvrings and in encouraging postcolonial thinkers to come up with newer modes of resistance and resilience to combat the rigid structures of colonial usurpation. The Indian Ocean witnesses how foreign invaders have time and again attempted to make colonial inroads into the rich and resourceful Indian subcontinent and holds newer possibilities for erstwhile colonized people who may choose to rely on indigenous narratives of being with the oceanic ecologies to take on various forms of ecological precarities backed by neoliberal capitalism. Questions concerning environmental justice, oceanic pollution, human threats, extraction industry, overfishing, climate change, blue precarity, blue archive, blue memory, blue trauma, blue economy, and so on and so forth, need to be taken up afresh to refashion human-ocean interface in the times of neoliberal globalization which centers on the dissemination and proliferation of globalized Western thoughts.     

The emerging interdisciplinary field of Blue Humanities has transformed our understanding of the ocean, shifting it from a passive backdrop to an active agent in human history, culture, and identity. The Indian Ocean, with its vast and dynamic histories of trade, migration, colonialism, and ecological transformations, has played a crucial role in shaping South Asian literary and cultural narratives. This special issue seeks to explore the intersections between Blue Humanities and South Asian literature and culture, emphasizing how the ocean serves as a site of memory, mobility, trauma, and ecological imagination. The Indian Ocean has long been a space of cultural confluence, marked by centuries of transoceanic exchanges, imperial encounters, and environmental shifts. However, scholarly engagement with the ocean within South Asian studies remains limited compared to Atlantic and Pacific studies. This special issue aims to bridge this gap by foregrounding literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of the Indian Ocean within a Blue Humanities framework. It will examine how South Asian literary and cultural narratives engage with themes of maritime histories, oceanic pollution, migration, and the oceanic ecologies that shape human and non-human life.

The following are some of the sub-topics for the special issue.

1. Postcolonial Oceans 

2. Oceanic Tourism 

3. Neoliberal Ocean 

4. Water as subversive Force/Hydropolitics

5. Oceanic disaster 

6. Oceanic pollution 

7. Trauma, memory and Violence

8. Maritime Infrastructure 

9. Oceanic Migration 

10. Ocean as Archive 

11. Indigenous Narrative, Urbanity and Coastal Ecology 

12. Oceanic Imaginary 

13. Oceanic as Literary Space 

14. Ocean as method 

This special issue will offer fresh perspectives on South Asian literary and cultural studies by engaging with the ocean as a dynamic, living archive. It will contribute to the growing discourse of Blue Humanities by emphasizing the Indian Ocean as an epistemic and aesthetic space that continues to shape South Asian identities, histories, and ecological futures.

We invite potential contributors to submit an abstract of 300 words by 30 April 2025. We are currently in contact with leading Scopus-indexed journals in the field of South Asian literature and culture, where we aim to publish this special issue. Final selection of abstracts shall be done by the editor of respective journal. Once accepted, we shall invite full articles by the end of November, 2025 from selected contributors.