Thinking with South African Oceans for Social and Environmental Justice

There has been a welcomed focus on oceans and bodies of water globally and in South Africa as part of a larter project on social and environmental challenges. This includes acknowledgement of the entangled histories of colonisation through oceans, what Isabel Hofmeyr (2019) has termed hydrocolonialism and how this is implicated in contemporary global extractivist capitalism and its impact in the (m)anthropocene. This paper speaks to a growing body of hydrofeminist scholarship in South African contexts, drawing on the work of Astrida Neimanis who coined the term, and with reference to a recently published volume entitled Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities that includes the work of scholars and activists located in South Africa that are thinking with ocean/s in addressing social and environmental challenges. In this paper I unpack the key philosophical and methodological framings that are emergent in this context, within the larger frramework of posthumanist, new materialist, decolonial and indigenous feminist thought and praxis. Much of this scholarship is also transdisciplinary and transmodal, and engages participatory active collaborations of art and activism, also blurring the boundaries of what counts as knowledge. It includes a range of embodied, affective and relational engagements including: walking and swimming methodologies; research-creation; hauntological approaches; and artistic practices such as poetry, photo-essays and theatre. We explore here the multiple and rich ways in which contemporary South African engagements with oceans may contribute to local and global social and environmental justice by drawing together our shared responsiblities for each other as humans, other species and the planet.