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“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Oloff, Kerstin; Deckard, Sharae

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) Thumbnail


Authors

Sharae Deckard



Abstract

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Citation

Oloff, K., & Deckard, S. (2020). “The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015). Humanities, 9(3), Article 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030086

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 14, 2020
Online Publication Date Aug 19, 2020
Publication Date 2020-09
Deposit Date May 27, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Humanities
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 3
Article Number 86
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030086

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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