Benthic Literacies: Glossing the Seabeds

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the concept of an “ocean literacy” has gained increasing currency from scientists, advocacy groups, governments, and international organizations. For many, its importance has never been greater than now, when the unprecedented intensity and confluence of anthropogenic warming and resource extraction has begun transforming–and often devastating–marine places, relations, and lives. All the while, however, the ocean literacy idea and its constitutive preoccupations with reading and writing have invited critical scrutiny from environmental humanists (among others) skeptical of attempts to stretch the logosphere to encompass the seas. This eight-part glossary for the seabeds figures one approach to negotiating this tension. Our research collective—whose members reside in and across the disciplines of literature, geography, geology, art history, and art practice—offers glosses that work, variously and occasionally even at variance, to clarify seafloor natures; to vivify the socioecological entanglements that have long—and diversely—tied anthropic to benthic realms; and to illustrate seabeds’ unruly effects upon the very possibilities of scrutation and inscription. Alien, flocculent, green, museum, plume, reserve, submersive, vent: glossing these terms, we register our coincident commitments to the real affordances of benthic reading and writing and the recognition of the seabeds’ equally real and irreducible semiotic strangeness.