T errestrial, bipedal, air breathing, and poorly waterproofed, how can humans fathom the bottom of the sea? This article was composed by an anthropologist, a cultural theorist, a philosopher, a coastal geographer, a cultural geographer, a feminist studies scholar, an artist, a spatial scientist, an ecocritic, a free diver, an STS scholar, a spear fisher, a biologist, a marine ecologist, a poet, a dancer, and a swimmer. (If the math does not add up, we remind you that we are always more than one.) Our insights emerged from a one-day workshop at Clovelly Beach in Sydney, Australia, on land and in the water, where we shared our perspectives and practices in researching ocean environments. Our collaboration is an experiment in multidisciplinary practice-based

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The ruins of wrecked ships are often so thoroughly dispersed by their submarine environments as to practically vanish. Sometimes, however, the conditions of a wreck’s submergence create complex modes of material endurance. Concretion, which names both a substance that forms on certain immersed surfaces and the phenomenon of that substance’s formation, is one such mode. Inspired by maritime-archeological objects and practices, this article asks how concretion—from the Latin concrēscĕre for “to grow together”—marks and reworks imperial alongside other presences at the seabed. The article develops a hermeneutics of benthic becoming at intersections in literary studies, critical theory, cultural geography, and recent subsea turns in the oceanic (and more broadly environmental) humanities. Wrecky concretion, I argue, configures the thickening presences of empire’s remains in the course of their underwater lives and in company with seawater, marine organisms, and inanimate beings. In this way, manifestly imperial presences actively coincide with others—and with the agencies, memories, and affects such presences may be understood to express (and not). Pivotally informed by Édouard Glissant’s critical deeps, Derek Walcott’s “The Sea Is History” (1978), and the politics of memory enacted by the Slave Wrecks Project and Diving with a Purpose, I observe a few of the ways that concretion may be punctuating and revising oceanic spaces, memories, and times. If the world ocean has long been unevenly composed by modernity, capitalism, and empire, it has also been reforming the wrecked stuff it receives into unanticipated configurations, growings-together that these pages provisionally ascertain.

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