Hester Blum

Introduction: oceanic studies

The ocean has lapped at the margins of the critical courses that literary, historical, and cultural studies have shaped in recent decades. Whether in Atlantic, Black Atlantic, transnational, or hemispheric studies; or in ecocritical, spatial, planetary, or temporal reorientations, the seas have bounded, washed, transported, and whelmed the terms and objects of such inquiries. Oceanic studies, the topic of special focus in this issue of Atlantic Studies, proposes that the sea should become central to critical conversations about global movements, relations, and histories. And central not just as a theme or organizing metaphor with which to widen a landlocked critical prospect: in its geophysical, historical, and imaginative properties, the sea instead provides a new epistemology a new dimension for thinking about surfaces, depths, and the extra-terrestrial dimensions of planetary resources and relations. Our aim in this special focus section, in other words, is not simply to extend into broader nautical regions the paradigms of Atlantic Studies; instead, the essays in this special focus section take the ocean both as a topical focus and as a methodological model for nonlinear or nonplanar thought. If the sea is ‘‘continually being reconstituted by a variety of elements: the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary,’’ as Philip E. Steinberg argues in his contribution, then modes of oceanic thought are themselves predicated on relations whose unfixed, ungraspable contours are ever in multi-dimensional flux. Oceanic studies can seem to have much in common with recent transnational and hemispheric turns in literary, historical, and cultural studies; they are mutually invested in assessing and moving beyond the limitations inherent in considering literary and cultural works as national products. But whereas transnational scholarship in literary studies has marked the various forms of exchange that characterize states’ relations with the world, the oceanic regions, with evidently little to offer or to receive within the terms of imperial or capital circulation, have remained on the outskirts of critical models of transnationalism. Even as nationbased scholarship has been extended or overthrown in a reorientation along hemispheric or trans-oceanic axes as exemplified by the essays published in Atlantic Studies in the past decade the planetary spaces of the seas have generally remained beyond the course of such work. The oceans comprise a realm in which cultural exchange, whether dominant, resistant, or just circulatory, has not been of primary critical concern on its own terms that is, independent of the seas’ function as a passage for travel. Oceanic studies shares with transnational work an interest in documenting cultural production and movement beyond given political margins

Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives

For most nineteenth-century readers of American sea narratives, actual experience of maritime life was hardly a prerequisite for appreciating the textual matter at hand. In fact, most sea writing was prefaced by assurances to the landed reader who might be wary of salty or technical language. Truth-averring prefaces, which glossed or justified sailors’ use of nautical terms, were conventions of the genre. Charles Barnard, for example, offered his nautical account ‘‘to the judgement of his fellow citizens, dressed in the simple language of a seaman’s journal’’; he hoped ‘‘it may be received with that indulgence which it claims as a narrative of sterling truth.’’1 Nathaniel Taylor similarly saluted the launch of his narrative: ‘‘Going forth to the world, it claims but one merit—fidelity to truth—and welcomes the reader to the iron realities of a sailor’s home and a sailor’s heart.’’2 Another seaman author, John Sherburne Sleeper, confessed that his narrative ‘‘may not contain much which is extraordinary or exciting; but the pictures it furnishes of ‘life at sea,’ the illustrations it gives of the character of the sailor, the temptations by which he is surrounded, and the moral as well as physical dangers which beset him

John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration

In 2007, a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, laying the groundwork for Russias claim to Arctic oil and gas resources. Blums essay explores the prehistory of Russias polar land grab in terms of the influential (if satirized) early-nineteenth-century theories of John Cleves Symmes, who believed the earth was hollow and accessible through openings at the poles. In discussing an early-nineteenth-century hollow-earth theorist and his influence on hollow-earth fictions-beginning with the narrative Symzonia (1820)-the essay considers the unexplored possibilities that the Arctic and Antarctic regions offer to hemispheric and transnational conversations, as well as to more recent calls to reorganize critical thinking from a planetary perspective. Blum explores the difference in resources, both material and critical, presented by polar spaces. By resources she refers both to the ecological substance of the polar regions, in their remove from predictable routes and terms of exchange; and to the imaginative and literary outcomes of polar exploration, which themselves did not follow recognizable circuits. Not just another geopolitical space, the polar regions suggest the ecological and critical potential of a nonproprietary, speculative attitude toward resources.

Melville and the novel of the sea

The intermingling of fact and fiction characteristic of Herman Melvilles three Polynesian novels was a hallmark of the early American novel. This chapter discusses Melvilles interest in the generic forms and presumptions of sea writing and of popular novels more generally. It refers in some degree to all of his sea writing, including Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. First, the chapter provides a genealogy for Melvilles sea novels whose trajectory does not presume a logical end in that brilliantly experimental work. Then, it also considers the implications of Melvilles frustration of generic expectations in the form of his domestic novel Pierre and riparian novel The Confidence-Man. Typee tests the limits of respectability in various ways, particularly in its critique of Christianizing impulses and Western senses of sexual and bodily propriety. Moby-Dick models a variety of narrative forms, and references to books or other texts proliferate.

The News at the Ends of the Earth

A newspaper . . . always represents an association, the members of which are its regular readers. That association can be more or less well-defined, more or less restricted, and more or less numerous, but the seed of it, at least, must exist in people’s minds, as evidenced by nothing more than the fact that the newspaper does not die. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part II, Chapter 6

Book Review: Jack Tar's Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum AmericaGlennMyra, Jack Tar's Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America.London and New York: Cambridge University Press [www.cambridge.org], 2010. xi + 194 pp., notes, appendix, index. £50, US

The way the company was set up was probably also motivated by how the owners could escape international attention. Walsh was obviously not a whaling expert when he went on this voyage. In fact, it was his very first encounter with the trade. Thus, some of his general observations on the whaling operations, whaling in general, and on whales, do not add significantly to our knowledge. The most interesting aspects are probably where he observes the peculiarities of this expedition from the perspective of his Coast Guard background; the seemingly chaotic preparations at the shipyard in Gothenburg, the social relations among the whalers, the special hierarchy in whaling and conflicts between officers and whaling managers. Walsh is a brilliant observer, standing outside the whalers hierarchy, yet at the same time working closely with the captain, the on-board manager as well as the whalers on deck. The book offers insight into a sad chapter of the interwar whaling industry where no robust management regimes and regulations were in place and a junior inspector could do little to prevent the slaughter. This was especially apparent on the Australian humpback whaling grounds. But Quentin Walshs critical report also brought something good with it, having at least had some influence on later American whaling policy and improved management regimes. Ulysses and her catcher boats went back to the west Australian and Antarctic whaling grounds for two more years. She was sunk during the war, together with so many other whaling ships. The Western Operating Company was dissolved in the 1950s.

85, cloth; ISBN 978-0-521-19368-9.

the maritime world has seen new traffic of late. In piracy, notably: recent incidents of Somali piracy in the gulf of aden seem borrowed from the archives of any number of recent popular history books and scholarly articles on the broader topic of the forms taken by sea banditry in the last 500 years. we might see three primary reasons for this, each of which speaks to a different form that piracy has taken historically. For one, the bicentennials of the abolition of the anglo-american transatlantic slave trade have spurred new interest in the piratical forms taken by the subsequent, continuing illegal slave trade. Further, North african Barbary piracy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been rediscovered by popular and academic history to some degree because of the current U.S.-Iraq war. and finally, the multibillion-dollar worldwide success of the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise beginning in 2003 has propelled popular attention, at all age levels, to the forms of buccaneer piracy practiced in and around the islands and coasts of the americas.