‘A Kind of Sensory, Strange Thing to Experience’: Speaking Environmental Disaster in the Sea Empress Project Archive

This article explores embodied encounters with the Sea Empress oil spill of 1996 and their representation in oral narratives. Through a close reading personal testimonies collected Project archive, I examine relationship between intense sensory experiences environmental change everyday interpretations disaster its legacy. The art­icle first outlines ways which this collection voices reveals memories, affects narrative choices to be deeply entwined representations spill, disclosing ‘sensory event’ that created powerful awareness both surroundings social processes. Then, these narratives against-the-grain, argue narrators’ accounts tell paradoxical story most now wish forget, reveal an ambivalent legacy is similarly consigned past. Finally, relate forgetting wider history consciousness modern Britain.