Blue Humanities and Children's Literature: The Praxis of Postcoloniality in the Disney Movies Moana & Pocahontas

Blue humanities examine how oceans and other bodies of water are portrayed and represented in literary texts, exploring their cultural, social and political significance. It re-examines literary texts through a “blue-lens” thereby garnering new ways of narrative interpretations. Children’s literature mitigates the concept of theoretical analysis in myriad ways. The idea of the sea as a dark and mysterious force is often undermined through narratives of the sea in an effort to annihilate the negative emotions of fear and fury associated with it. Literatures of the world have often treated the dread of death by water and the untamed furies of the majestic waves as themes of intimidating significance. Contrary to these confounding notions that are rampant through the erudite academia, Disney movies such as Moana and Pocahontas portray a more humanistic picture of the sea as a living, pulsating entity, that reaches out and talks to children. The proposed paper would attempt to analyze how Children’s literature in general and Disney movies in specific etch new ways of comprehending oceans as material and social entities that serve as a dynamic metaphor of meaning formation. While Children’s literature unfurls a narrative propaganda of its own, Disney movies coalesces concepts of environmental post-humanism with post-colonialism and decoloniality thereby making oceans the milieu of trans-disciplinary interactions as well as the narrative force behind its myriad discourses.