Tidalectic Visions of the Postcolonial Atlantic

There are texts that sprout, emerge, and surface from the seas, the amniotic and fluid element from which we all originate. The ocean bears witness to, soothes, and transforms the traumas of the colonial era. This book is a homage to the narrative reimaginings of post-decolonial texts from the Atlantic space. Drawing on the recently established research field of Blue Humanities and its “tidalectic” perspective, the book explores the eco-partnership strategies that three authors from the ‘margins’ employed to respond to and “write back” against Western-oriented epistemologies and literatures. The works examined, E.K. Brathwaite’s Caliban (a poetic rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (a narrative reimagining of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), and Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version (a theatrical rewriting of Homer’s epic), are scrutinised to uncover how the element of water and the necessary re-establishment of a partnership with the other-than-human dimension become key to reimagining and redrawing our precarious “brave new world”.