Ecoceanic(a) : Multilingualism, oceanic science fiction, decoloniality, and the ambivalences of anthology-making

This article analyses Ecoceanic/Ecoceanica (Future Fiction, 2024), an anthology of Southern science fiction, to show how its form exposes the ambivalences of decolonial publishing. Far from functioning as a neutral container, the anthology operates as a formal device that both disrupts and depends on inherited national and linguistic hierarchies — through its dual publication in English and Italian, its editorial choices, and its deliberate retention of unglossed words — while also moving away from national boundaries towards a polycentric South–South literary space where the ocean, rather than the nation, emerges as the organizing principle. Yet this oceanic framing also reveals the tension between decolonial aspirations, such as foregrounding Global South voices, challenging linguistic hierarchies, and undoing a western teleology of modernity and progress, and the global routes of translation and mediation through which the anthology circulates. The article, therefore, aims to explore this ambivalence, which underpins the ecological politics articulated in the stories, illuminated here through Malcolm Ferdinand’s concept of écologie décoloniale. Ecoceanic translates Ferdinand’s framework into imaginative futures where marine environments foreground relations between humans and nonhumans, advancing a planetary poetics that couples anthology design with decolonial ecological thought, while simultaneously revealing the structural tensions that condition such work.