In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Antiracism, Blue Humanism and the Black Mediterranean
  • Paul Gilroy (bio)

For Pia Klemp, Carola Rackete and their peers at sea, thesereflections on a global quandary on finding myselfonce again on Mediterranean waters

This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another—from forest to city, from story to computer—at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.

—Edouard Glissant

1

It has been obvious for many years that if we are to make sense of the tragedies unfolding in the black Mediterranean, we must master the challenge of thinking at sea level. That skill will also assist us with analysis of the emergent catastrophe of the black Manche/Manche noire, which has been precipitated by divided Britain's misoxenist departure from the EU. In response to those perils, philosophy must prepare to get soaking wet.

A new and urgent articulation of what can heuristically be called "planetary humanism" can begin by cultivating a different understanding of the importance of water to the species-life and embodied [End Page 108] experience of humankind. That change is more than a matter of adjusting conceptualizations of culture to accommodate its liquid character alongside, or even against, its territorial associations. We must follow, but will need to surpass, Hans Blumenberg's promptings, which encouraged attempts to reacquaint contemporary criticism and analysis with the significance of shipwrecks and other perilous maritime events in the origins and development of theoria.

We have to habituate our style of thought to fluvial perspectives. We must learn again to think with, through and about water: salt and sweet, less and more polluted, in our bodies and outside them, in droughts and floods, even in the self-regulating cycles that remain largely inaccessible to human agency. Concern with water in all our bodies can foster radical new commitments to the predicament of endangered bodies in the rising water. Sea levels do and will change, but the re-alignments involved in the rigor of thinking at sea level immediately differentiate our conjunctural commitments from the placeless concerns of high theory which habitually looks down upon the world, sometimes from a forbidding altitude.

2

I have come to these problems as somebody with a longstanding interest in the history of racial orders as well as a political commitment to their undoing. My utopian leanings confirm my status as something of a dinosaur in this nihilistic age, but the fluvial orientation I am proposing corresponds to what we need to learn about the primal responsibility we bear towards other human beings who are faced with elemental perils like flood, drought and pollution as well as acute, deadly emergencies and risky activities like sea-travel undertaken by African fugitives, refugees and travellers. Their example is especially important because there are clear, moral and juridical obligations associated with the interrelated practices involved in salvaging people from water, naming the drowned and promoting their denied dignity by grieving for them or just burying their bodies in a respectful manner.

In many circumstances, those difficult ambitions refer us to the forms of care and sociality conditioned by disaster and what might be termed the banality of good. That work is akin neither to disaster capitalism nor to the fabled resilience we hear so much about. It composes a fragile network of disaster altruism, disaster solidarity and disaster care.

It may be helpful to note that aspects of it were anticipated in the new testament parable which long ago outlined Jesus's oblique commentary [End Page 109] on the nature and limits of neighbourliness. That response was offered in answer to an anxious inquiry...

pdf

Share