Abstract
The blue humanities names a current of scholarly and artistic discourses that foregrounds human relationships with water. While many writers and thinkers in this mode emphasize oceans, blue humanities thinking also explores fresh water, ice, and even water vapor, from lakes and glaciers to groundwater and humidity. During the dozen years or so in which this term has been circulating, much of the writing and thinking in this mode has emerged from Anglophone and literary contexts, with emphases on Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean locations. Current strains in blue humanities thinking are attempting to widen the focus to engage global, non-Western, and Indigenous materials. Emphasizing the Pacific as our planet’s dominant ocean basin, and referring to the Indigenous Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez as an exemplary Pacific author, this chapter takes the measure of the past dozen years of blue humanities scholarship. The shift from Anglophone Atlantic to global Pacific measures an expansion of geographical range and demonstrates a reconsideration of patterns of connection and communication. Shifting from the uber-canonical Shakespeare to the new voice of Perez inverts the geographic pattern of the past decade. While the Pacific dwarfs the Atlantic in size, Perez’s public visibility remains tiny compared to Shakespeare’s. This chapter introduces the blue humanities by considering the benefits and costs of Atlantic and Pacific lenses, as well as the values of historical authors such as Shakespeare and new voices like Perez. The current moment seems to presage a global, multilingual, and inclusively creative methodology for blue humanities best represented by the cultural practices of Oceania.
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Mentz, S. (2022). Blue Humanities. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_68
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