Of sunken attractions: writing the terraqueous into undersea tourism and leisure

First, an indulgence. For some time I have had a preference for blue tourism and leisure instead of the more widely studied marine tourism and leisure; this rests mainly on the conviction that the qualifier ‘blue’ as it has been used in blue humanities, blue cultural studies, and blue scholarship more generally is a term that gestures towards the open-ended possibilities of oceanic worlds. By contrast, marine has seemed a term that has become too loaded with the kind of naval endeavours that characterized the gifting of modernity to the world, a term locked into a specific form of enlightenment that narrows the spectrum of what it is possible to see. While derived from the Latin term mare for the sea, it is a name that has been much associated with maritime space and the vessels that have navigated the surface. The term ‘blue’, by contrast, appeared to me to be free of these constraints and more sensitive to the differences afforded by oceanic spaces and our encounters with them. Specifically, blue spaces are resistant to the importation of land-based thinking, what Blum (2015, 29) refers to as ‘the epistemological payload of the insularity of land’ and, at the level of being, they perform a radical opposition. In blue spaces, the immersed pleasure-seeker can become transformed and return to land with renewed appreciation for the world around them, a transformation of the kind that can only ensue from extreme forms of encounter with the surreal, the alien, the ‘other’ that is the oceanic estate.