Aesthetic objects from Asia offer rich thematic and formal resources that unsettle imperial and instrumental regimes of knowledge production and return us to sustainable forms of co-habitation amidst ongoing marine crises in the age of the Anthropocene.

This project critically examines the figuration of oceans, seas, rivers, and bodies of water in contemporary Asian literary and cultural narratives in English and vernacular languages. While liquid and watery forms have garnered considerable attention in the emergent field of the blue humanities or the oceanic humanities, they have not attained systematic analyses within Asian literary and cultural studies. Adopting an inter-Asian framework, this project probes how Asian writers and cultural producers animate oceanic genres, forms, and images in order to articulate modes of affiliation that exceed imperial and national structures of power. In so doing, the project traces how aesthetic forms of inter-Asia incorporate culturally specific and socially situated oceanic thoughts as part of their efforts to repair and restore fractured human-ocean ties. Foregrounding the watery as material and symbolic spaces, this project addresses a series of interrelated questions: How does oceanic thinking contest aerial and terrestrial modes of knowing Asia? How do Asian artisans and cultural workers register aquatic imaginaries in their formal and rhetorical designs? To what extent have indigenous sea cosmologies inflected artistic expressions of human-marine relationships? My wager is that aesthetic objects from Asia offer rich thematic and formal resources that unsettle imperial and instrumental regimes of knowledge production and return us to sustainable forms of co-habitation amidst ongoing marine crises in the age of the Anthropocene.