| Sumario: | This article rereads Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) through the critical framework of the Blue Humanities, an emergent field within environmental humanities that foregrounds water as a formative ecological, historical, and political force. While existing scholarship on Beloved has productively engaged feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial paradigms, it has largely privileged land-based spatialities such as plantations, houses, and burial grounds. This study addresses that critical gap by arguing that Morrison’s pervasive aquatic imagery—oceans, rivers, rain, amniotic fluid, and spectral wetness—functions not merely as metaphor but as an active, agentive presence shaping memory, embodiment, and resistance. Drawing on Philip Steinberg’s concept of "wet ontology" and Astrida Neimanis’s theorization of relational, more-than-human embodiment, the article conceptualizes water in Beloved as a "blue archive": a living repository of diasporic trauma and generative possibility. Central to this reading is Morrison’s invocation of the Atlantic Ocean as both abyssal graveyard and womb-like reservoir of Black diasporic history. The Middle Passage, figured through Édouard Glissant’s notion of the "womb abyss," becomes a site of paradoxical destruction and rebirth. This aquatic liminality is mirrored in the Ohio River crossing, where Sethe’s escape from slavery coincides with Denver’s birth, staging water as a midwife of survival. Beloved’s wet, spectral emergence further embodies submerged histories that refuse erasure. By situating water as a politicized, militarized space of border-making and exclusion, the article connects Morrison’s narrative to broader global discourses on dispossession and "wasted lives." Ultimately, Beloved articulates a blue ethics of remembrance and relation, positioning water as a historical force essential to both African American memory and contemporary ecological thought.
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