Oceanic Fictions in Indian Languages and Beyond

The legacies of empire include not only global inequalities but also an environmental crisis in which the oceans have been sites of maximum damage done by the hubris of the Anthropocene. Shifting attention away from the territorial and terrestrial frames to the fluvial spaces of the ocean and the connected waterscapes like seas, rivers, and lakes is one way of making a decolonial foray into the critical praxes in the spaces of the Global South (Menon and Zaidi 2023). The need for an amphibious approach to history is at the core of this project, which aims to not only track how different communities have interacted with the ocean and its role in shaping civilisational moorings and material cultures but also, moving a step further, deploy the “transversal” approach of Dussel (2012), which posits a “movement from the periphery to the periphery.”

This issue invites articles that highlight the local and vernacular articulations of oceanic encounters through engagement with fiction written in Indian languages (Bhasha) and, by extension, other non-European languages from the Global South. The objective is not merely to add to the available body of work but also to forge alternative terms of discourse beyond the debates of the “cosmopolitan” (Hofmeyr 2010) or “vernacular” (Green 2018). By integrating oceanic humanities with decolonial studies, this issue explores how focusing on non-European writings from the Global South opens new terms of engagement with the ocean, non-humans, and the environment beyond the border-oriented grammar of modernity.

Scholars are encouraged to critically examine fictions in non-European languages and submit papers on themes that include but are not limited to:

•    Littoral spaces and cosmopolitan/vernacular/creole life-worlds
•    Island narratives and politics of corporeality; Archipelagic approach
•    Coastal communities, ecologies, and cultural relationality
•    Language as the site of cultural encounters/affinities; indigenous knowledge
•    Forms of oceanic encounters: human—human; human—non-human
•    Oceanic voyages, intercultural dialogues, interconnectedness, entanglements
•    Ocean as method; ocean as archive; poetics of water; aquatic epistemologies
•    Coloniality, oceanic narratives and the decolonial turn
•    Maritime histories of indenture, slavery, racial miscegenation; subaltern lives
•    Coeval temporalities, pluriversal possibilities
•    Critical ocean studies; race, gender, class, and other intersectional approaches
•    Ocean and spirituality; spectrality; affect; emotions; sensorium

References

Dussel, Enrique D. 2012. “Transmodernity and interculturality: An interpretation from the perspective of philosophy of liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (3): 28-59. https://doi.org/10.5070/t413012881

Green, Nile. 2018. “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean.” American Historical Review 123 (3): 846–878.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2010. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA 125 (3): 721–729.

Menon, Dilip and Nishat Zaidi. 2023. Cosmopolitan Cultures and the Oceanic Thought. Routledge.

Submission Instructions

Abstracts should be 500 words (excluding bibliography and 100-word bionote) and sent as a single MS Word file to special issue editor Nishat Zaidi (oceanicfiction@gmail.com) no later than December 31, 2025. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the special issue editor. A decision on the submission of the abstract will be communicated by the guest editor by January 31, 2026. The deadline for submitting full manuscripts is May 15, 2026.

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words, including the abstract, keywords, main body of the article, figures, endnotes, and references. All completed articles must initially be emailed to the guest editor, and following their feedback, they must be submitted to the journal’s online submission portal for external review.

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