"Atlantic archipelagic women’s narratives as fractal models of resistance: The case of The Mermaid of Black Conch"

This study addresses ecocriticism’s “ocean deficit” by foregrounding contemporary Atlantic archipelagic women’s literature as a cultural force for reimagining human-sea relations and resisting exploitative practices. Drawing on island feminism, it explores how islandness and gender intersect, producing models of resilience rooted in fluid kinship across human and nonhuman realms. Adopting the transdisciplinary approach of the Blue Humanities, the Atlantic archipelago is examined as a formation where disruption and precarity become resources for survival. This reframing informs a gendered ecocritical reading of Monique Roffey’s archipelagic novel The Mermaid of Black Conch. The analysis shows how the protagonist’s attunement to the insular environment – through transcorporeal exchanges and interspecies mutations – disrupts fixed notions of women and water as passive, reimagining them as dynamic, relational forces. Roffey’s fiction models an archipelagic existence that embraces fluidity, disavows domination, and accepts contamination as survival, generating fractal forms of resistance from island to planetary scale.