Respatialising the Cape ocean through planetary attending

Pivoting around the oceanic environment of the Western Cape in South Africa, this paper surfaces black geographies of ocean often submerged from view by colonial spatialities and formations. This is done through an analysis of the documentary—The Glow in the Water—that co-produced by the authors as well as interviews we conducted as part of making the film. Despite the colonial apartheid state’s efforts to sever black people’s relations with the ocean, we suggest that black imaginaries of the ocean have not been blunted by efforts to render them ungeographic. The ocean tethers them to shoreline pasts as fishers, their healing practices are bound to the ocean, and through their coastal memories, they root themselves as indigenous to the shore. In walking the shore as we interviewed and filmed coastal people and the sea, we cast our analytic eyes to the water in a planetary worldmaking practice of imagining oceanic futures. In this paper, we suggest that to imagine this way is to practice forms of respatialising South Africa’s geographies of exclusion. This entails turning to the water, refusing alienation, illuminating oceanic voice, and crafting planetary kinship and pleasure from relations to the ocean.