This open access edited collection explores various aspects of how oceanic im/ mobilities have been framed and articulated in the literary and cultural imagination. It covers the entanglements of maritime mobility and immobility as they are articulated and problematized in selected literature and cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. In particular, it brings cultural mobility studies into conversation with the maritime and oceanic humanities. The contributors examine the interface between the traditional Eurocentric imagination of the sea as romantic and metaphorical, and the materiality of the sea as a deathbed for racialized and illegalized humans as well as non-human populations
Author(s): Alexandra Ganser, Charne Lavery
Series: Maritime Literature and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 261
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Maritime Im/Mobilities
Oceanic Revisions: From the Maritime Frontier to Archipelagic America
New Directions in Oceanic Studies
Mobility Studies and Oceanic Cultural Studies
Works Cited
Part I: Shapes of Water
Chapter 2: Storied Waves: Maritime Connections and Subaltern Knowledge in Arctic and Mediterranean Literary Contact Zones
Arctic Mysteries and Indigenous Knowledge
Mobile Maritime Packages
The “Black” Mediterranean
In Conclusion: Rescuing “Wasted Lives”
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Birds of the Plastic Pacific: Moving (the) Masses
Birds
Albatross
Rubber Duck
Birds Again: Motif, Motivation, Mobilization
Works Cited
Part II: Colonial/Imperial Mobilities of the Sea
Chapter 4: Maritime Mobility and the Work of Susanna Rowson: Transatlantic Perspectives
A Tale of Shipwreck
Imagining Transatlantic Mobility
Imperial Fantasies in “Rise and Progress of Navigation”
Becoming-American in Reuben and Rachel
A “Happy” Ending: Slaves in Algiers
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Reading and Writing the Ship in “Benito Cereno” and “The Heroic Slave”
The Ship as Contested Space
Melville and the Machinery of Enslavement
Madison Washington’s Nautical Literacy
Conclusions: New Mobilities and Life After Social Death
Works Cited
Chapter 6: South Seas Speculation in Finance and Fiction
Works Cited
Chapter 7: From HI-SEAS to Outer Space: Discourses of Water and Territory in U.S. Pacific Imperialism and Representations of U.S. Mars Colonization
Introduction: Hawai‘i as “sMars”
Water as Territory in U.S. Imperialisms
Surf or Turf? Negotiating the Territory of Mars in Andy Weir’s The Martian
Conclusions: Mars in the U.S. National Imaginary
Work Cited
Part III: The Aesthetics of Oceangoing
Chapter 8: Precarious Passages: On Migrant Maritime Mobilities, ca. 1907
Maritime Modernity, Part 1
The Steerage: Points of View
Migrant Maritime Im/Mobility and the Grand Ocean Liner
Transatlantic Transfers: Subject Constitution at Sea
Maritime Modernity, Part 2
Works Cited
Chapter 9: High Sea and Sediment: Watermarks in Ilse Aichinger’s Work
Flood and Memory
Narrative Riverbed, Run Dry
The Sea: A Radio Play
Stain-Sediment
Works Cited
Chapter 10: “Ocean People”: Maritime (Im)Mobilities in the Chinese American Imaginary
Crossing Oceans: Chinese (American) Mobility in the Pacific and Beyond
Ship Voyages
Island Sojourns
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Going Nowhere: Oceanic Im/Mobilities in North American Refugee Fiction
A Literature of Flight: Writing against Necropolitics
The Prec(ar)ious Lives of Refugees: De/Territorialization in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”
Genealogies of Violence and Survival: Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 12: “Spoken Nowhere but on the Water”: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Lost-and-Found Languages of the Indian Ocean World
Introduction
Laskari
Lost Languages of the World of Work
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
