Even as ocean-region-based studies gain popularity, they all too often fail to engage the aqueous center that lies at the heart of every maritime community. Studies that seek to highlight political–economic connections across ocean basins tend to ignore the sea altogether, while those that highlight it as a site for challenging modernist notions of identity and subjectivity tend to treat the ocean solely as a metaphor. In contrast, this article argues that in order for ocean-region-based studies to reach their potential, the ocean must be engaged as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation across all of its dimensions. Drawing on a range of theories, from conceptualizations of more-than-human assemblages to the oceanographic modeling techniques of Lagrangian fluid dynamics, this article proposes a perspective that highlights the liquidity of the ocean, so that the sea is seen not just as a space that facilitates movement between a region's nodes but as one that, throug...

Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

idea that intercultural encounters enhance culture and civility, he highlights violence and death. Moving swiftly through the Romans, the Christian crusade, and other ancient examples, Herder scathingly criticizes contemporary European colonial practice of the Germans in the Baltic regions and that of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and Holland in Africa and the East and West Indies. Although in Ideen Herder had praised European openmindedness and the spirit of world trade, here he comments that the colonized regions cry for revenge because European colonialism continuously devastates their living conditions.170 Travel writings inform Herder about the European slave trade— for him, the greatest misery in the history of humanity.171 Europe and the colonized part of the world are juxtaposed through contrasting qualities, such as good and evil, injustice and candor, war and vulnerability, oppression and suffering. In Herder’s eyes, slavery is the greatest crime of European colonialism. In letter 114, Herder presents disturbing stories of colonial slavery in the form of idyllic poems titled NegerIdyllen.172 York Gothart Mix and Gerhard Sauder accurately point out that Herder intentionally and ironically deploys the genre of idyllic poetry, conventionally associated with the beautiful nature and the peaceful life of a shepherd in primeval times, to demonstrate the deep rupture between utopia and reality.173 Herder injects a heavy dose of colonial truth into the world of idyllic poetry to ironically comment on the Rousseauian idea of noble savage, which compares numerous nonEuropean cultures to Europe’s past and Arcadian peace and innocence. To some extent, this is also Herder’s ironic response to his own philosophy of history.174 “Die Frucht am Baume” (“Fruit on the Tree”) powerfully condemns the excess and cruelty of a white master who takes away the bride of a black slave and imprisons him in a cage hanging on a tree. “Die rechte Hand” (“The Right Hand”) and “Die Brüder” (“The Brothers”) tragically eulogize the noble characteristics of the black slaves because they sacrifice their bodies and their lives to follow the dictate of their hearts and the principle of justice. As a matter of fact, these poems portray nothing idyllic. What the poems evoke is a strong abhorrence for the white colonizers and a moral indictment of colonial atrocity. Yet it is precisely this detestation that prompts an even stronger desire for an idyllic state, one where white and black people live together following noble moral principles. Herder endeavors to elaborate this dream with his vision of perpetual peace and his concepts of historical revenge and equal authenticity of cultures. The Iroquois’ story of peacemaking shapes Herder’s idea of perpetual peace, which contrasts with Immanuel Kant’s vision of the same topic based on a priori principles and pure reason. Herder conceives of Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, to call for a global justice and human dignity that defies the protean nature of time. While Herder’s early concept of cultural relativism stresses the aspect of individuality, now he places more weight on the notion of equal authenticity in the context of his colonial critique. Herder Johann Gottfried Herder 155 also predicts Europe’s crisis and decadence based on the continuation of slavery and cruel colonialism. Reading Herder’s Humanitätsbriefe, I am not merely concerned with showing Herder as a German philosopher with a good conscience; more importantly, I aim to demonstrate that nonEuropean knowledge and reality significantly challenge Eurocentrism and coconstruct the ethical dimension of Herder’s philosophy of history. In letters 118 and 119, Herder illustrates his vision of perpetual peace with a story of the Iroquois, a Native American tribe documented in the travel narrative Missionsgeschichte in Nordamerika (History of the Missions in North America). As many critics point out, his vision of perpetual peace is situated in the European intellectual project of perpetual peace initiated by Abbé Saint Pierre in 1713 and further discussed by JeanJacques Rousseau and others.175 The most famous treatise is certainly Immanuel Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace, 1795). Pheng Cheah comments that Kant’s cosmopolitanism marks a turning point of political theory from intrastate to interstate concerns, a point “at which the ‘political’ becomes, by moral necessity, ‘cosmopolitical.’ ”176 Cheah is also aware, however, that Kant’s vision was formulated prior to the rise of nationalism as a political movement in Europe. Therefore “it is more a philosophical republicanism and federalism designed to reform the absolutist dynastic state than a theory of opposing the modern theory of nationality.”177 Unlike Kant’s project, Herder’s discussion of perpetual peace does not prove a merely philosophical project. Herder’s vision is richly informed by colonial realities and discloses the enormous impact of nonEuropean culture and knowledge on his thinking through the Iroquois story. Moreover, Herder’s project of perpetual peace endeavors to reach beyond the geographical borders of Europe and incorporate the entire world. Its primary interest is not only a European peace, as Kant’s intended to be, but also peaceful relations between Europe and the nonEuropean world, between the colonizers and the colonized. The Iroquois story goes like this: As the result of constant intertribe conflicts caused by a strong tribe (the Delaware), a weak tribe (the Iroquois) suggests how to keep peace with the stronger tribes: one tribe should be the woman, around whom the warring tribes live as men. No one should harm and attack the woman. If one tribe does so, then all other tribes together should punish the lawbreaker. The woman should not get involved in war, however, but should endeavor to maintain peace. If the male tribes fight against each other, the female tribe should warn them that their women and children may be killed and in the end the whole tribe will be extinguished. The Delaware agrees to be the woman tribe. The Iroquois thus perform a ceremony and hang oil and medicine on the arm of the woman. Oil symbolizes that the woman of peace should tell good things to all the tribes. Medicine symbolizes that the woman of peace should persuade warring tribes to maintain peace

Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism

What does the history of exploration look like when approached from a different disciplinary perspective, that of the history of books? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this essay reframes exploration histories that typically retrace continuities between explorers, by focusing instead on the discontinuities in the changing conditions of authorship and publication. Specifically, the essay considers the convergence of exploration and book history at three critical junctures: at the turn of the eighteenth century (Dampier), in the mid-to-late eighteenth century (Cook), and in the early nineteenth century (Ross). What if we shifted the ground of inquiry away from the geographic routes these explorers retraced, to the publication protocols that made their books possible in their particular forms, under changing models of authorship? And what if we expanded our inquiry beyond metropolitan print, to include inscriptions in site-specific media-like stone and ice? By looking at the contingent circ...

Oceanic voyages, maritime books, and eccentric inscriptions

My dissertation traces the development of the Jolly Jack Tar, a widespread image of the common British sailor, beginning with the formal establishment of Royal Navy in 1660 and ending in 1817 with the publication of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a novel devoted to presenting a new model of the professional seaman. I also analyze Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789) in conjunction with ephemeral cultural artifacts like songs, cartoons, newspapers, and miscellany to fill in the variable, uneven history of the novelistic Jack Tar over the course of the long eighteenth century. My analysis seeks to answer the following questions: How do fictionalized accounts of sailors (like those found in novels) reflect, challenge, or reinforce the portrayal of sailors in other cultural texts, like songs or plays? How does print culture inflect the construction of Jack Tar, particularly regarding the figure’s connection to Britain and an emergent national identity? How do literary and cultural texts represent seamen’s complicated relationship to the home and the family, particularly when seamen were, by the nature of their profession, typically far from Britain? To answer these questions, I bring together print history, performance studies, post-colonial studies, maritime history, and disability studies. I contend that the complex image of Jack Tar was a tool authors employed to advocate for a new type of British man, one who is brave, patriotic, and supportive of the homefront, but also destructive, a drunkard, and sexually promiscuous. I argue that the Tar was used by black and white sailors to craft their own self-representations and carve out a place in British society. Lastly, portrayals of Jack Tar on the British stage, in images, and in novels, particularly those published at the end of the long eighteenth century, seek to contain and reframe the potentially destabilizing effect of demobilization which resulted in thousands of seamen, many of whom disabled, returning home and lacking a clear path for reintegration. In essence, complex and often contradictory literary and cultural representations of the Tar reflected eighteenth-century Britons’ concerns over emergent masculine identities as well as anxieties of and hopes for the expanding nation.

M Beaumont

Papers

The novel and the sea