In a time of climate change, ecological collapse, and increased attention on the impact of human industry on the environment, the Blue Humanities have risen in response to the need to understand the fraught relationship of human communities with oceans, shorelines, and marine ecosystems.

This panel explores the fraught relationship of human communities with oceans, shorelines, and marine ecosystems from the periphery of the Iberian world from the 19^th to the 21^st centuries. The oceans and marine lifeforms inscribed in Iberian cultural production open spaces to understand cultural and material processes in which the ocean and oceanic life becomes enmeshed with human life and imagination. This panel will be a pioneering contribution to the unexplored academic field located at the confluence between Blue Humanities/Eco-criticism and Iberian Studies. It aims to rethink well-established cultural imaginaries about the ocean as a symbolic and material space in Iberian cultures as well as to establish new connections among temporal, regional, and generic categories with a focus on the Atlantic.

Using theories of the sublime and of sensory materiality to understand natural space, Silvia Bermúdez’s presentation, "The Oceanic Imaginary and Galicia’s Costa da Morte," explores the flow from a land-based approach to the Atlantic to positions that arise from embracing oceanic/aquatic frames of mind. Bermúdez focuses on two cultural products from Galicia: Manuel Rivas’s poetry book Costa da Morte Blues (1995) and Lois Patiño’s film Costa da morte (2013). The presence of the ocean in Rivas’s book is examined as an emblematic representation of the Oceanic sublime in Galician literature; a literary modality in which the aesthetics and rhetoric of landscape invokes the sublime. Patiño’s film, conversely, allows audiences to appreciate the immensity of that same space vis-à-vis people intimate’s experience of it.

With Mahan Ellison’s “Street of Water, Salty Border, and a Liquid Mother: The Ocean as a Dynamic Image in Hispanophone Moroccan Literature,” we find a vision of the ocean (the Atlantic at its confluence with the Mediterranean, in this case) as an organizing geographical framework and as a genitive force in literary production that leads to a re-mapping of the world. Ellison’s talk ties literary aesthetics and African emigration to Europe to questions of material ecocriticism. Through the analysis of works by Hispano-Moroccan authors, this talk explores the use of the ocean as a dynamic and organizing space in contemporary Hispanophone Moroccan literature. Informed by the work of critics such as Yi Fu Tuan and Selena Iovino, Ellison will show the impact of understanding the ocean as both the “lifeblood of poets” and “liquid mother” (Mohamed Chakor), and as deadly geographies for African migrants (Ahmed Oubali).

Picking up the theme of the coexistence of creation and death in the cultural imaginary of the ocean, Rhi Johnson’s “Sirens and Seaweed: Material Agencies and the Re-enchantments of Nature” explores the relationship between the contemporary eco-critical concept of “re-enchantment of nature” and the peopling of the seas with “enchanting” supernatural creatures during the ninetieth century. Johnson’s talk explores how this connection allows for a re-engagement with the material and ecological agencies of the water. Through an examination of seaweed and sirens in Rosalía de Castro’s La hija del mar (1859) and poems by Nicómedes Pastor Díaz (1840s), Johnson demonstrates how the contact between the natural and the marvelous contributes to the dissolution of “the habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves” (Morton), and connects Anthropocene figurations of human-ocean relationships, oceanic material agencies, and our concerns over climate and the global ocean to the centuries-long process of modernity.

Daniel Ares-López’s “Oceanic fauna, fishing imaginaries, and the capitalist appropriation of marine life in contemporary Galician culture” will shift our attention to the Atlantic ocean in modern Galician culture as a living space and a space of work (both the self-sustaining reproductive work of fish and other marine life and the extractive labor of the fishermen and women). Ares-López’s talk explores these two forms of life and labor as key aspects in the development of a capitalist market economy in coastal Galicia since the 19th century. Through an analysis of the Basque documentary Arte al agua. Los bacaladeros de Terranova (2017) (which chronicles cod fishing in Newfoundland between the 1950s and 70s) and the collection of short stories Contos do mar de Irlanda (2014) by Xurxo Souto, this presentation shows how dominant oceanic imaginaries in Galician culture celebrate forms of capitalist appropriation of marine life and normalize forms of exploitation of humans. At the same time, they invisibilize the anthropogenic collapse of marine ecosystems in the Anthropocene.