Writing Underwater: Oceanic Knowledge and Colonial Mediation in Syaman Rapongan's Eyes of the Ocean

This thesis examines how Tao oceanic knowledge is mediated through colonial conditions in Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of the Ocean (2018). It argues that Tao knowledge survives not by escaping the structures that suppress it but by passing through them: a Mandarin language shaped by continental orientation, a body severed from the seascape that gave its knowledge ground, and a spatial imagination organized by the “developmental gradient”. Each topic gives the thesis a chapter. Chapter One analyzes Mandarin narration as a “continental filter” and traces how sensory and phonological density works against it. Chapter Two reads the knowing body through embodied epistemology and animist ontology, tracing how colonial labor dispossesses the body’s knowledge while the text restores its constitutive permeability. Chapter Three examines colonial spatial order and, reading Eyes of the Ocean alongside Cold Sea, Deep Feeling, traces how Syaman Rapongan’s literary sea shifts from oppositional destination to connective medium.