Oceanic Memory and Ecological Affect in The Whale Rider, The Deep, and Weather: A Blue Humanities Reading

The emergence of the Blue Humanities has redirected critical attention from land-centred ecocriticism to oceanic spaces as sites of cultural memory, historical violence, and ecological imagination. This article examines how contemporary fiction redefines the ocean as a sentient and storied space through close readings of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider, Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, and Jenny Offill’s Weather. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, hydro-criticism, affect theory, and decolonial ecocriticism, the study argues that these texts collectively challenge anthropocentric paradigms by foregrounding nonhuman agency and oceanic memory. Ihimaera reclaims the sea as a site of ancestral return and indigenous ecological knowledge; Solomon reconfigures the ocean as a repository of intergenerational trauma rooted in the Middle Passage; and Offill renders the sea as an affective horizon that registers contemporary climate anxiety. Through a comparative framework, the article demonstrates how oceanic narratives mediate relationships between history, identity, and ecological crisis, thereby expanding the scope of the Blue Humanities. By positioning the ocean as an ethical and imaginative space, the study underscores the capacity of literature to foster ecological empathy and to reimagine human responsibility in an era of planetary precarity.