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
This collection explores various aspects of how oceanic im/mobilities have been framed and articulated in English-speaking literary and cultural imaginaries. 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.
Dieser Band untersucht, wie ozeanische Mobilität und Immobilität in anglophonen literarischen und künstlerischen Texten verhandelt werden. Das Buch beschäftigt sich mit den verschiedenen Verknüpfungen maritimer (Im)mobilitäten in unterschiedlichen Fallstudien vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Die Beiträge bringen kulturwissenschaftliche Mobilitätsstudien mit dem Forschungsfeld der "blue humanities" aus unterschiedlichen Fächerperspektiven in einen Dialog.
Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that ...expression of space, through examining ways in which the author's structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argues that the way in which Indian Ocean space is represented discursively in Gurnah's fiction is crucially linked to its representationality. This involves an exploration of the space of the literary text itself: the interrelationship between the space of and in narrative. The article will outline three instances of the ways in which the narratives are spatially inflected: the centrality of travel to the represented space and Gurnah's engagement with problems of perspective; narrative authority and the ways in which this is mediated through multiple narrative voices; and the gaps in the history of the Indian Ocean, gaps refracted through thematic and formal silences in the novels. It focuses on an early and a later novel, Memory of Departure and By the Sea, while also drawing on Dottie, Pilgrims Way and Desertion.
Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue is a book about political transition, the new South Africa, and the challenges of transformation, but it is also a book about sewage. Toilets, outhouses and worms ...feature prominently, as do sewerage systems and wastewater treatment facilities, particularly in small towns and rural areas. Scatological themes are a staple of postcolonial fiction, constituting what has been called “excremental postcolonialism”. Krog’s work both underlines that vision through vivid corporeality, while also presenting plumbing as a response to the entropy of the postcolony. The first part of this essay demonstrates the ways in which the book, while explicitly concerned with land, is implicitly just as concerned with water. The second part shows how the depiction of sewage links the local and ecological to the national and continental; highlights questions of service delivery and, presciently, contemporary protest; and evokes the paradox of wastewater, between vital element and excess waste.
Antjie Krog's A Change of Tongue is a book about political transition, the new South Africa, and the challenges of transformation, but it is also a book about sewage. Toilets, outhouses and worms ...feature prominently, as do sewerage systems and wastewater treatment facilities, particularly in small towns and rural areas. Scatological themes are a staple of postcolonial fiction, constituting what has been called "excremental postcolonialism". Krog's work both underlines that vision through vivid corporeality, while also presenting plumbing as a response to the entropy of the postcolony. The first part of this essay demonstrates the ways in which the book, while explicitly concerned with land, is implicitly just as concerned with water. The second part shows how the depiction of sewage links the local and ecological to the national and continental; highlights questions of service delivery and, presciently, contemporary protest; and evokes the paradox of wastewater, between vital element and excess waste.
Abstract
Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, ...cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica and its surrounding Southern Ocean are uniquely implicated as crucial mediators for changing global climate and currents, rainfall patterns, and sea level rise. This paper proposes that there are in fact several ways of imagining the far South from Africa in literary and cultural terms. One is to read against the grain for southern-directed perspectives in existing African literature and the arts, from southern coastlines looking south; another is to reexamine both familiar and new, speculative narratives of African weather – drought, flood and change – for their Antarctic entanglements. In the context of ongoing work on postcolonial Antarctica and calls to decolonise Antarctic studies – such readings can begin to bridge the Antarctica–Africa divide.
Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, ...through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging genre of South African crime fiction. Trevor Corbett's Allegiance (2012) and Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens' Out to Score (2009) map Durban and Cape Town, respectively, as deeply oceanic, port-dominated cities, connected through networks of smuggling and terror to distant Indian Ocean coasts. They reveal the flip side to the Indian Ocean carceral archipelago - networks of crime implied by networks of punishment. In so doing, producing, alongside the legal Indian Ocean world of trade and travel, the figure of an Indian Ocean underworld. Indian Ocean fiction from further afield - Lindsey Collen's Boy (2005) and Abdulrazak Gurnah's The Last Gift (2012) - set up the Indian Ocean underworld as a critical lens through which the South African crime fiction can be read. Focusing on the underworld therefore provides a way not only of uncovering recent Indian Ocean history, but also of drawing together Indian Ocean with southern African studies.
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