The oceans have long been viewed as passive backdrops to human history. Yet, from Stacy Alaimo’s material-feminist analysis of ocean acidification (2016) to Ian Buchanan’s description of the blue humanities as “a movement in literary and cultural texts” that “re-establish[es] a kind of poetics of the ocean” (2018), the blue humanities has brought a narratological focus to ocean studies that accounts for the rapidity and global magnitude of Anthropogenic change. Today, Blue humanities scholars (Blum 2013; Dobrin 2021; DeLoughrey 2017; Iovino 2015; Lehman 2016; Mentz and Oppermann 2019, 2023) are increasingly recognizing that the seas demand new, interdisciplinary approaches, urging us to rethink their role not just as physical landscapes, but as potent spaces of cultural, environmental, and geopolitical contestation. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese’s Our Mother Ocean (2014) illustrates how the global waters have been privatized and toxified, leading to the forced relocation of oceanic life—both human and nonhuman. Yet, as Rachel Price suggests, Blue Studies must go beyond lamenting the past “freedom” of the seas and the militarized oceans of today. Instead, we must cultivate “sea ontologies” (DeLoughrey) that challenge the hegemonic, extractive relationships between humans and the ocean. This panel seeks to foster sea ontologies and aims to move beyond the Western “turn to the sea,” which often overlooks those who have long inhabited oceanic spaces, and focuses on the Mediterranean as a dynamic, affective, and multidirectional mnemonic space.

To promote effective discussion, I have selected four panelists who will be strictly limited to 10-12 min. papers. Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim (myself) will be the presider who will pose questions both to the panelists and the audience so that a lively discussion may ensue. We begin with Mohammed Muharram’s paper “Mocha City: An Autobiography of the History of Coffee (2021).” Mohammed argues that the novel navigates Yemen’s place in Mediterranean and global maritime networks, intertwining trade, migration, and colonial encounters. This brings to life the experiences of Yemeni merchants, sailors, and travelers, whose movements across the Red Sea and Mediterranean shaped histories and memories often overlooked in Eurocentric maritime narratives.

Elisabetta Visaggio’s “Between Water Sung and Travelled: How Musically-Mediated Representations of Water Preserve and Circulate Memories of Seaborne Migrations” explores the mnemonic power of water imagery in the musical narratives of migration, focusing specifically on the mass emigration from southern Italy at the close of the nineteenth century. Visaggio analyzes the lyrical content and spatial dimensions of three traditional songs: Mo se parte la nave ra lo porto from Cilento, Villanella from Acri, a song remediated by Calabrian immigrants in New York, and Michele’u camposant from Northern Apulia. Visaggio argues that the Mediterranean becomes a “geomnemonic” region, a site where diverse, coexisting narratives of emigration are continuously circulated, embodying both the continuity of tradition and the rupture of memory.

Evren Özselcuk’s paper, “Mediterranean Witness,” argues that Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case, a video project by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, reconstructs the 2011 Mediterranean tragedy in which a migrant boat drifted for fourteen days without assistance, resulting in 63 deaths. Özselcuk compares Liquid Traces with Abu Bakr Khal’s African Titanics, which portrays migrants crossing the Mediterranean on sinking boats. While both works assign the Mediterranean an agency as a witness, African Titanics employs mythic techniques to connect the Mediterranean to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, weaving this history into the broader narrative of contemporary migration.

The panel concludes with a paper by Ezgi Hamzacebi, whose study engages Mediterranean waters both as a material and metaphorical force, positioning “Speculative Fictions” as a critical tool for reimagining human-sea relations. Hamzacebi focuses on the international Water Assemblies at Salt, a leading contemporary art institution in Istanbul. At the core of Water Assemblies, “Speculative Fictions” —through interdisciplinary dialogue and creative storytelling—offer fresh perspectives on future scenarios of climate change and ecological collapse in the waters of Anatolia and the Mediterranean.

These diverse papers challenge and expand the scope of blue humanities scholarship, particularly its focus on how the Mediterranean links Europe with other continents and geographies while engaging with its imperial, colonial past and neo-colonial present. The panel fosters a dialogue across the Mediterranean, reimagining the sea not only as a site of contact zone, but as a multidirectional mnemonic space of movement, survival, and resistance. It transcends traditional divisions of North/South, East/West, and local/global. By framing Mediterranean encounters in this way, the panel contributes to the evolving discourse on blue humanities and offers new perspectives on the aesthetics of the Mediterranean, beyond binary logic and reductive frameworks.