Atlantic reckonings: (Capitalist) man vs. the sea in twenty-first-century disaster narratives

This essay tracks the emergence of a new form of sea fiction in twenty-first-century popular culture, especially tied to disaster fiction. “Atlantic reckoning” tales stage the current dissatisfaction and disillusionment with late capitalism in an oceanic context, retrieving the historical connection between the rise of capitalism and the exploration of the Atlantic. Taking Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2022 novel The Light Pirate and Peter Berg’s 2016 movie Deepwater Horizon as case studies, and following Margaret Cohen’s theorization of sea narratives as deeply enmeshed with capitalism and labor practices (2010), the essay analyzes primarily the notion of maritime “craft,” and secondarily those of “adventure” and “edge,” to reach the conclusion that contemporary Atlantic disaster narratives, in portraying an explicit reckoning with the failures of capitalism, seem to retrieve “craft” as the viable alternative for a sustainable coexistence between humans and waterscapes.