Toward Blue Cultural (Re)Visions in the Literature of the Northern Mozambique Channel

The ocean has been represented as a mysterious and alien space; too fast to comprehend yet compressed in narratives, in many studies. Once a neglected area in literary studies and discourses, the ocean is now gaining a considerable attention by scholars. This article is an exploratory analysis of the cultural meanings of the ocean scape with close references to the Mozambique Channel literary productions. By locating African studies in the context of the ocean scape—itself a site of antique multicultural negotiations—the article suggests a shift in the ocean’s ancient meanings to the early modern period meanings encapsulated in slavery and colonialism. The article examines trends and dominant images that contribute to a blue cultural understanding of these artistic works. The study seeks to illustrate that the ocean scape speaks to a catalogue of modern knowledge hubs such as post colonialism, globalization, history and environment. By drawing on New Historicism, the article provides examples on how the Mozambique Channel Ocean scape discourses shift our interpretation of this postcolonial literature by first, engaging an explication of select texts and secondly, through a (re)consideration of historical contexts of the Mozambique experience in favour of blue cultural studies. The study (re)visits how indigenous traditions, values, customs and art forms as depicted in these works (inter)penetrate other social discourses as cultural expressions.