Oceanic Becoming: The Pacific beneath the Pavements [Hardcover]

From disappearing coral reefs and ocean acidification to floating great garbage patches, the Pacific Ocean is an ever-present reminder of the Anthropocene. InOceanic Becoming, Rob Wilson demonstrates that in the midst of the planetary crises the Pacific now faces, it must be understood as interconnected to the other oceans. Wilson frames this interconnection as “Oceania,” reconceiving the world oceans as tied to sites of urban dwelling and life sustenance—from Boston to Brisbane—that are increasingly threatened by late capitalism. Confronting these threats, Wilson argues, requires a project he theorizes as “worlding”—a process of world-making and world-remaking across Oceania that would create new forms of belonging and connection at local, regional, and transnational levels. Wilson shows how Oceania is not just a site of peril but one charged with emergent literary and social formations that can provide the basis for new solidarities, futures, and ecologies.USOutline the environmental crises the world’s oceans currently face, Rob Wilson theorizes a practice of “worlding,” which would build upon existing social ties to the ocean that would provide the basis for new forms of belonging and ecological futures.Rob Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of, among other books,Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, also published by Duke University Press, andBe Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.“Oceanic Becomingforegrounds Rob Wilson’s contention that new epistemological frameworks are urgently needed to create a more responsive planetary sense of multispecies belonging and becoming. The significance of his notion of Oceania inheres in its potential to open space, time, and consciousness for other values and modes of being. Epic in scope l#9