[electric] NOTES: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals

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Explore the stories, theories, and works of scholars thinking about Black and Indigenous American experiences.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals

“Where Emergent Strategy offers us the opportunity to study and practice the work of shaping change by understanding ourselves as part of the ongoing emergence of nature, this guide to undrowning listens to marine mammals specifically as a form of life that has much to teach us about the vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation we need in order to be with change at this time, especially since one of the major changes we are living through, causing, and shaping in this climate crisis is this rising of the ocean” (7).

Undrowned is a wonderful companion to Emergent Strategy as it continues conversations of biomimicry, or the act of letting nature teach us how to live, love, and be in community. Undrowned looks at dolphins, whales, and certain types of sharks to determine how to build stability and community in an everchanging world fueled by the instability of climate crisis and capitalism. It thinks about the importance of naming and terminology, reminding us that these languages become the terms of social labels and constructions that overdetermine and overclassify existence. Undrowned looks at how colonialism and capitalism is changing the ecologies, climates, and weather of our worlds (sea and land).

IDENTIFICATION is a key strategy in undrowning, which Gumbs defines as: “identification, that process through which we expand our empathy and the boundaries of who we are become more fluid, because we identify with the experience of someone different, maybe someone of a whole different so-called species” (9).

TO IDENTIFY WITH IS: “To see what happens when I rethink and re-feel my own relations, possibilities, and practices inspired by the relations, possibilities, and practices of advanced marine mammal life. That’s an emergent strategy” (9) – emergent strategy as understanding ourselves as unfolding and evolving with nature

Gumbs evokes the indigenous values of her Ashanti ancestors, emphasizing that they “call the name of the whale as one of the names of god” (emphasis mine; 11).

Gumbs makes plain the colonial urge to classify all that is readily unlike itself, the colonial need to trace genealogies and conduct research precisely for purposes of captivity. She draws parallels between Black people and marine animals, insisting that captivity and transubstantiation and misrecognition/transcription are things both groups have in common (pg. 33, 44).

In drawing these parallels and extracting lessons from the lives of marine mammals, Gumbs treats a species traditionally thought of as “other” as kin and thinks through various modes of animal-human relation and interconnection. For instance, by offering a parallel about the interrelation between marine mammal and human breathing: “One of the physical characteristics that unites us with marine mammals is that they process air in a way similar to us…they do not have gills. We, too, on land are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must” (21).

Find Undrowned here.