Blue bordertexturing: (un)knowing Caribbean wet borderlands

The ocean, as Epeli Hau'ofa wrote in 2008, is “our most powerful metaphor”. It has reliably served as one of humanity's most compelling, inspiring gateways to explore (non-)human coexistence, precisely because, as Steve Mentz put it, its “poetry represents one of the best tools we have for communicating across different scales simultaneously”. As such, the ocean speaks soundly to a multi-level, multiscale, nuanced, complex investigation of borders and borderlands, as the idea of tapping into dense, poetic language to express a conflation of multiple meanings and dynamic relations, however complementary or contradictory, in a single image is currently gaining significant traction in Cultural Border Studies. My contribution to this special issue aims to offer a decolonial exploration of texts from Caribbean wet borderlands for lessons that oceans may teach us about the conceptualization of borders. Grounding my experimental approach in a productive theoretical fusion of Bordertexturing, Archipelagic Thinking and a Seascape Epistemology – Blue Bordertexturing – I will explore texts from these wet borderlands for reflections and imaginations that embrace and productively utilize as an epistemological irritator the ocean's perpetual motion, fluidity, and opacity, to transcend the paradigms of Western epistemology and colonialism, and invite us to organize knowledges about borders differently.