The sea, as both site and symbol, has been associated with vast possibilities of expansion on the one hand and for limitation, even incarceration, on the other. In various contexts of historical empire-building and resistance, oceans have functioned as both bridge and boundary for coastal and island cultures. They represent spaces of the mobilities of colonization and conquest, including massive, violent displacements of enslaved and indigenous peoples, as well as immobilizations, such as carceral islands and prison ships. In the literary and cultural imagination, the sea has been figured as an ambivalent space between a frictionless, connecting pathway and an entrapping void. This ambivalence persists into the present, prompting various strands of research across the humanities. The maritime violence of colonialism across the sea is continued today by the large-scale exploitation of the sea as a resource itself. Thus, contrary to scholarly binaries of land and sea, and of human and natural history, “the sea is history,” to quote Derek Walcott’s famous poem (Walcott 2007; Birkle and Waller 2009).

With thousands of asylum seekers and refugees stuck for weeks at a time on the Mediterranean or dying in the Atlantic during desperate attempts to reach safety, oceanic pollution by recklessly exploitative industries (from overfishing and devastating oil spills to mass-tourist cruisers), rising sea levels due to climate change, and a global economics based on cargomobility, maritime im/mobilities have gained critical status for the development of viable futures—social, economic, environmental, political, as well as imaginative. As refugees, human smugglers, NGOs and Frontex patrols, environmental activists, modern “pirates,” maritime laborers and tourists cross each other’s paths in physically, legally, politically, and culturally fluid oceanic spaces, an arena of conflicting im/mobilities emerges. In Anglophone writing and other media, whose analysis is at the center of this volume, this arena has been articulated through oceanic representations for centuries, in ways that may offer possibilities for reimagining socio-cultural, environmental, and economic relations with and across the seas today.

There has been an increasing interest in representations of maritime im/mobilities in recent years, as part of what is now generally termed the “oceanic turn” in the humanities. With the Anglophone Atlantic prompting this turn more than three decades ago, scholars have conceptualized various versions of the Atlantic Ocean: the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), the Red Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Armitage 2001; Weaver 2014, referring to Native American presence), or most recently, the Green Atlantic (referring to the Irish Atlantic—O’Neill and Lloyd 2017; Gough 2018). Thus, the beginnings of the oceanic turn also reflect the North Atlantic triangle’s claim to economic and political dominance throughout the Cold War. The Pacific has come into focus more recently, not coincidentally reflecting the post-Cold-War crumbling of North Atlantic claims to global leadership. In the same context, the Indian Ocean has recently been named as a central future site in the contest between Chinese and U.S.-American power (Kaplan 2010), raising critical interest also in early South-South globalization and alternative universalisms (Hofmeyr 2007; Gupta 2012; Anderson 2012). Last but not least, imaginaries concerning the largely nonhuman space of the Southern Ocean are now also receiving increasing attention in contemporary Anglophone cultural and postcolonial studies (Hofmeyr 2007; Bystrom 2017; Lavery and Samuelson 2019; Lavery 2020).

Overarching labels such as “blue cultural studies,” “oceanic humanities,” or “wet globalization” (Blum 2015; Steinberg 2015; Mentz 2015, xxix) mark the onset of theorizing maritime studies in more general terms. In the following, we briefly discuss one of the first key shifts in oceanic studies—the shift away from area studies—using the field of American studies (from which many of the contributions to this book emerge), as an example. We then delineate a selection of recent critical perspectives in the maritime humanities that have extended, but also criticized, earlier assumptions: Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and class-, race-, and gender-based assumptions especially. They mark a shift toward (new) materialist, feminist, and ecological approaches that frequently hark back to postcolonial theories of relatedness and its critique of mechanistic dialectical models (e.g., Glissant 1981; Brathwaite’s tidalectics, see Savory 2011). Finally, we outline some of the ways in which Anglophone maritime studies has been informed by mobility studies, which has evolved as an interdisciplinary field within the humanities since the 1990s—perhaps not a coincidental parallel to the beginnings of maritime cultural studies. Taking up cultural geography’s revision of the field to acknowledge the centrality of im/mobilities in history and society and move beyond logistics-centered transportation studies, mobility studies focus on the production of mobilities and immobilities historically, socially, politically, and culturally (on the latter, see esp. Greenblatt et al. 2009). Ocean-based, culturally-represented im/mobilities are at the focus of the present volume, which sets out to explore how variously mediated manifestations of such im/mobilities have been framed and articulated in Anglophone literary and cultural imaginaries in different historical and geographical contexts.

Oceanic Revisions: From the Maritime Frontier to Archipelagic America

The recent focus on maritime themes and figurations in studies of Anglophone literature and culture has contributed to a critical revision of earlier, often essentialist, area studies approaches. Traditional container models, as frameworks of analysis and interpretation, have been increasingly replaced with much more fluid concepts that highlight transnational—and transoceanic—connections and entanglements. In what follows, we are using a description of the ways in which the oceanic turn played out in the field of American studies as an instructive example.

One of the earliest projects in American oceanic studies was the “Oceans Connect: Culture, Capital, and Commodity Flows across Basins” (1999) research project based at Duke University, which responded to the political and theoretical crisis in area studies after the end of the Cold War, especially with regard to the essentialist assumptions underlying the area concept itself (Lewis and Wigen 1999). Reframing area studies around oceans and sea basins, the project proposed to supplant land-based areas with the Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, and Eurasian and Pacific Oceans and aimed at putting “maritime connections at the center, rather than the margins” of research (Lewis and Wigen 1999, 162). While the initiative set out to “bring to light a set of historical regions that have largely remained invisible on the conventional map of the world” (161), it received, in hindsight, criticism for its political, post-Cold-War agenda as it was seen as seeking to relocate U.S.-American areas of influence rather than providing a corrective to the use of academic disciplines for “further[ing] the strategic interests of the United States, making it intellectually as well as morally suspect” (164).

Maritime approaches nevertheless brought to the fore the sea as a lively zone of cultural contact and conflict in American studies and highlighted the role of littoral societies in cultural mobility and exchange (e.g., Ganser 2013). The Atlantic sub-group of the Oceans Connect network insisted, for instance, on the slave trade as fundamental for the emergence of the United States and modernity at large, taking cues from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). In his seminal monograph, Gilroy conjures the “the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean” (1993, 4) to highlight transnational movement in the context of the black diaspora. For Gilroy, ships represent “the moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders” as well as “micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity” (12) at sea. Along with forms of personal movement, Gilroy foregrounds “the circulation of ideas … as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts” in the context of Afrodiasporic cultural and political exchange throughout the Black Atlantic world (4). James Procter summarizes that “[c]irculation, movement, passage and journeying are Gilroy’s preferred metaphors here, allowing him to move beyond what he takes to be the narrow, sclerotic confines of the nation” (2007, 152). Gilroy’s study indeed calls attention to maritime mobilities as key in processes of transnational cultural exchange as well as to the sea as a site of black agency and empowerment. Race-critical studies of the Black Atlantic proliferated in Gilroy’s wake, offering new perspectives on maritime American fiction (e.g., Mackenthun 2004). A plethora of other works in this vein continued a trans-Atlantic focus, mostly leaving intact, however, the primacy of the North Atlantic area (or triangle) as a point of reference (see, e.g., Sharpe 2016).

With the turn to the Pacific, this hegemony has been challenged, as indigenous perspectives—e.g., from Hawai’i—came into view and contested Western conceptions of the ocean as a mere medium of transportation, a sublime metaphor, or a lawless, anarchic space to be regulated by international law (see Kempe 2010). Indigenous Pacific perspectives impacted on trans-Atlantic studies in turn: Jace Weaver’s 2014 The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 demonstrates how, from the earliest moments of European-American contact, indigenous Americans played a pivotal role in trans-Atlantic processes of cultural exchange. Matoaka/Pocahontas or the Arawak that Christopher Columbus brought to Europe are perhaps the best-known examples, but even they have been relegated to the margins of historical accounts of the Atlantic. Weaver resists Eurocentric discourse by placing indigenous people/s at the center of the Atlantic world, focusing on both forced and voluntary transatlantic crossings of Natives as dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers, soldiers, performers, and tourists. These travelers introduced Europe to a variety of foods and indigenous knowledges—from potatoes and chocolate to terrace farming and suspension bridges.

As a term, the Red Atlantic also relates to a second, class-based strand of discursive intervention in hegemonic, nation-bound accounts in oceanic American studies. In the field of history, David Armitage, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker, among others, have written maritime “history from below.” Their work demonstrates how a mass of sailors, plantation workers, indentured servants, and slaves became part of a fledgling Atlantic economy of accumulation in the seventeenth century: an Atlantic proto-proletariat (Armitage 2001, 479; Linebaugh and Rediker 2000, 61). American literary history from below deck is epitomized by Hester Blum’s seminal study The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008), which turns to sailors as a population of remarkable readers and writers in the Anglophone world. Exploring sailors’ contributions to literary culture, Blum examines first-person narratives which proposed methods for aligning labor and contemplation, but also investigates the representation of labor relations in canonical oceanic literature by James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana.

The most recent area-critical approach in American studies, epitomized by scholars such as Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens (2017) and John Carlos Rowe (2014) re-reads American literature and culture from an archipelagic perspective. Reconceiving American studies as archipelagic studies, this perspective replaces conventional continental narratives with a view of America as “constituted by an assemblage of interconnected islands, archipelagoes, shorelines, continents, seas, and oceans” (Roberts and Stephens 2017, book cover). It draws on archipelagic criticism developed in the Caribbean (e.g., by Édouard Glissant) and Pacific (e.g., by Epeli Hau’ofa [2008]) and significantly coincides with archipelagic criticism of the Indian Ocean (see Clare Anderson [2012] on Foucault’s “carceral archipelago” or Pamila Gupta’s “monsoon archipelago” [2012]). The archipelagic approach signifies the most recent step in questioning problematically reductive, land-based concepts of areas, connecting American studies to the wider world and highlighting global concerns of exploitation, human and nonhuman (see also Helmreich 2009). This critique was arguably made possible only by a turn to the ocean which highlights connectivity and interrelatedness rather than exceptionality and singularity. In sum, the development we have delineated above demonstrates that each of these oceanic shifts in American studies also reflects larger transitions both in the field and occurring in a variety of other geographic and intellectual regions, just as new directions in oceanic studies, discussed in the next section, are reflected here too.

New Directions in Oceanic Studies

Oceanic studies has allowed for a much-needed move beyond the limits of area studies, as the case of American studies above demonstrates, inspired continually by the development of new directions in the maritime humanities—subaltern, new materialist, feminist, and ecocritical. The view of the ocean from the perspective of its laborers has become a productive direction in cultural studies well beyond the Anglophone literary realm. In cultural geography, this includes what scholars such as John Urry and Philip Steinberg have called “cargomobilities” (Steinberg 2015; Birtchnell, Savitzky, and Urry 2015). Steinberg argues that “[u]nder capitalism, the sea is idealised as a denatured and seemingly immaterial surface of latitude-longitude coordinates across which work (the displacement of mass) can be exercised with minimal resistance so as to enable the annihilation of space (or distance) through time (or speed).” The ocean in this view is seen as “immune to social inscriptions or constructions of territory.” Steinberg resists this construction, showing that the ocean is much more “a space of depths, vertical displacements, particle movements and hydrodynamic (as well as social) forces—… anything but a flat, stable surface” (2015, 36; see also Steinberg 2001; Cusack 2014). He calls for us to “reference how the ocean is idealised as immaterial distance as well as the ways in which the boundaries of the global maritime economy exceed the ocean’s borders” (Steinberg 2015, 43)—an exhortation taken up, for instance, in the art of the late Allan Sekula (e.g., his Okeanos series).

The turn to the ocean has produced other perspectives “from below”, for instance Clare Anderson’s work on “subaltern lives” in the Indian Ocean (2012), which retrieves fragments of archival evidence that allow for the partial reconstruction of the histories of subaltern travelers around Indian Ocean coasts. A growing body of scholarship on lascars supplements this work, which has been taken up and deployed in literary fiction by the writer Amitav Ghosh (see his Ibis trilogy), among others. Khal Toorabully, a path-breaking thinker from Mauritius, deploys “coolitude” as a lens through which to read for experiences of indentured laborers in the Indian Ocean and beyond (see, e.g., Carter and Toorabully 2002).

We might perhaps view this history and geography from below as enmeshed in an older, Marxist materialism, yet what scholars like Steinberg are interested in is also the human interaction with the materiality of cargo and the sea itself, echoing recent developments in cultural studies that can be largely framed within a new materialism. This new materialism turns to the ocean’s materiality and ecology in its interrelatedness and interaction with human agency, mostly in the form of oceanic devastation, from plastic islands in the Pacific to overfishing and the consequences of global warming for the world oceans. It is significant that one of the key figures in environmental thinking, American biologist Rachel Carson, concerned herself with the ocean in The Sea Around Us in 1951, a decade before she published the classic Silent Spring (1961). Starting from the fact that two thirds of our planet and about 90% of most species consist of water, Anglophone ecocritical and ecofeminist work has since then re-conceptualized thinking about the sea in terms of human-nonhuman interaction, interspecies solidarity, and “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Patricia Yaeger, see Yaeger 2010). As Hester Blum points out in “Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic Studies,” this insight

is urgent in our current planetary moment: metaphorizing earth and sea, abstracting them from the effects of human actors, has severe consequences both environmentally and politically. Oceanic studies are predicated on a belief in the sea’s imaginative and material resources. Both kinds are under constant threat, a contingency that helps account for the field’s present emergence at our moment of climate change. (2010, 26)

Such and similar ecocritical perspectives on the sea, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, return to French historian Jules Michelet’s La Mer, published in 1861. La Mer combined natural and human history in ways newly inspiring in the twenty-first century, as many oceanic ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. This bleak outlook is taken up by, among others, Teresa Shewry’s Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (2015) which presents literary visions that offer an alternative, hopeful imaginary. Similarly, Astrida Neimanis’s eco-feminist intervention Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) develops a hopeful “hydrofeminist” ethics in which human beings are tied to human and nonhuman others. Developing a feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world rather than separate from or privileged to it, Neimanis builds on earlier work by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. In addition to Shewry’s and Neimanis’s work, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s discussion of the “heavy waters” of Atlantic waste (2010) and Donna Haraway’s suggestive maritime neologism of the Chthulucene (2016), a tentacular age whose main task will be to repair the Anthropocene’s devastations, mark the fundamental ecocritical dimension of the blue humanities. Decolonizing the ocean from human-only, romanticized, masculinist, and Western capitalist perspectives thus represents a common goal in the Anglophone oceanic humanities and connects them to the natural sciences, which also continually draw attention to the destruction of oceanic ecologies and its harmful consequences for our planet.

In our view, decolonizing the ocean is an ecological project itself, one that challenges hegemonic binary thinking and ideas of linear progress that are currently threatening a planetary ecosystem fundamentally reliant on functioning oceanic ecologies. Turning to indigenous, non-Western, and diasporic knowledges not for their exotic appeal but for their potential to correct Eurocentric misconceptions is important in this respect. One concept that has been taken up repeatedly in the context of Anglophone literary and cultural studies is Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics, a cyclical rather than dialectical model of development based on water’s characteristic mobility and on oceanic rhythms. The tidal back-and-forth of the ocean presents “a Caribbean cultural alter/native to Hegelian dialectic … based on the complex interaction of waves lapping on Caribbean beaches, coming together, opposing, dissolving, recreating themselves constantly” (Savory 2011, 14). This has been used as a model, e.g., in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2007) exploration of island literatures in order to articulate relations between routes and roots and destabilize essentialist national, ethnic, and regional frameworks still at work in our field of research.

Mobility Studies and Oceanic Cultural Studies

As these developments demonstrate, that which many scholars are now referring to as a “new thalassology,” “blue cultural studies,” or “blue humanities” (see Mentz 2009; Gillis 2013) speaks to a series of contemporary discourses such as globalization, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, feminism, and science and technology studies (see also the notions of an extraction-focused “techno-ocean” [TON 2017] or “cyborg ocean” [Yaeger 2010, 523]). Arguably, these recent developments also present an important corrective to the romanticized celebrations of fluidity and liquidity in Anglophone cultural studies and beyond through the 1990s and 2000s, showing how metaphors of a liquid modernity and fluid identities are in line with idealizations of neoliberal markets without borders. In blue cultural studies, liquidity, permeability, osmosis, and viscosity (e.g., in Neimanis 2017) are more than metaphors, but often tend to be kept as ideals for subjectivities beyond spatial fixations. The interdisciplinary field of mobility studies has drawn attention to the problematics of such idealizations in times when millions of global refugees long for spatial stabilization and the safety of a new home on the one hand and, on the other hand, has highlighted how the mobility of some has often been predicated on immobilizing others. In this volume on Anglophone representations of maritime mobilities, we discuss, rather than resolve, such tensions between oceanic mobilities and immobilities; while some of the contributors zoom in on nonhuman and ecological mobilities, the majority highlights trans-oceanic journeys of people—their cultures, products, and ideas—traversing the sea or entrapped by it.

Mobility studies has been thriving in a trans-disciplinary manner similarly to the oceanic humanities, marked also by the founding of new journals (such as Mobilities or Transit) and book series. The field has addressed mobility (defined, e.g., by Tim Cresswell as “socially produced motion” [2006, 3]) in the context of the proclamation of a “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006) as a transformative physical-geographical, material, socio-economic, and cultural practice. Sociologists and cultural geographers like Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, who initiated the field, have called for a critique of the fetishizing of mobility over the many immobilities that contemporary mobility discourses both produce and obscure—while Europeans insist on their Schengen rights of free travel within the European Union, for instance, this mobility privilege has been linked in an ideological conjuncture with the need to close the European Union’s borders to unwanted migrants, meanwhile dying by the thousands during Mediterranean crossings.

Our volume responds to this call by exploring the entanglements of mobilization and immobilization as they are articulated and problematized in Anglophone maritime literature and culture, with case studies reaching from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Our contributors bring into dialogue traditional Eurocentric imaginations of the sea as metaphorical-romantic or material-economic resource with critical representations of maritime im/mobilities in which the ocean emerges as a deathbed for racialized and illegalized humans as well as for nonhuman inhabitants (due to overfishing, microplastics, climate change, etc.). Our collection critically explores the multi-faceted world of oceanic im/mobilities and the work of their cultural representations in the Anglophone world, asking in what ways maritime im/mobilities are articulated and negotiated, affirmed or contested, and to what effect. Located at the intersection of the two interdisciplinary fields of the maritime humanities and mobility studies, the volume takes up cultural geography’s revision of mobility beyond mere transportation studies, to question the production of mobilities and immobilities in Anglophone literary and cultural forms in exemplary historical and geographical contexts. As case studies, rather than making universal claims, the contributions demonstrate how the combination of these approaches yield new insights in terms of both the aesthetics and the functions of representations of maritime im/mobilities in their specific socio-cultural and historical contexts.

The first section, “Shapes of Water,” looks at the fundamental question of how oceanic waters can be translated into literary writing and art. Opening the section, Gesa Mackenthun’s essay “Storied Waves: Maritime Connections and Subaltern Knowledge in Arctic and Mediterranean Literary Contact Zones” draws on postcolonial discourses to highlight how maritime mobilities are turned into stories that problematize knowledge and power. Showing how indigenous perspectives reconfigure the Western analytic, both transoceanically and transculturally, in a variety of oceanic contact zones—including the Mediterranean, the Central American Isthmus and the Northwest Passage, the article zooms in on the intersections between imperial scientific hubris and the brutal disciplining and silencing of colonized bodies and voices in these contact zones. Asking how these intersections impact on literature, the author starts with American perspectives that are broadened by examples beyond the Anglophone realm (e.g., Peter Høeg’s bestselling 1992 novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow). The second essay by Kylie Crane, entitled “Birds of the Plastic Pacific: Moving (the) Masses,” points us toward the new materialist approach in oceanic thinking by focusing on the material mass of the ocean itself in a Pacific context, including both written and visual culture. Noting that the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is a misnomer that erroneously suggests an easily visualizable and static mass of plastic, Crane explores how images such as that of the Layson albatross, laying prostate within plastic (in Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series and Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume) or the rubber duck (in Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie’s book Slow Death by Rubber Duck and Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck) can be mobilized ecocritically. She suggests that mobility refers not just to the moving material itself, but also to “being moved,” i.e., the different aesthetic measures employed to effect responses and responsibilities.

The next section of essays (“Colonial/Imperial Mobilities of the Sea”) explores the relationship between maritime mobilities, nation and empire more specifically and with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whether with regard to the historical depredations of European colonialism or projected futures of colonies in outer space that heavily draw on past rhetorics of annexation. The first two articles concentrate on the Atlantic. In his essay “Maritime Mobility and the Work of Susanna Rowson: Transatlantic Perspectives,” Leopold Lippert describes how playwright William Dunlap locates the beginnings of American theater on a ship, the Charming Sally, in 1752, identifying the origins of a national American theater tradition as a transnational story of maritime mobility in the Atlantic world. Thomas Massnick’s essay “Reading and Writing the Ship in ‘Benito Cereno’ and ‘The Heroic Slave’” posits that slave ship narratives offer important critical insights into political thought on slavery and mobility. Its comparative reading of two canonical slave ship revolt narratives, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” reflects on the way people in contested maritime spaces are particularly subject to colonialist discourses with real legal consequences. The second pair of essays moves to the Pacific and draws out complex connections between past and present discourses about maritime colonization: in “South Seas Speculation in Finance and Fiction,” Melissa Kennedy takes us to the Pacific on a wider historical scale, arguing that the largely imaginary space of the South Seas, as it was created in canonical eighteenth-century British literature (e.g., by Daniel Defoe) and is echoed in contemporary TV series (e.g., the BBC show Taboo), crucially informs the similarly imaginative financial speculations that continue to undergird the West’s view of the Pacific. A similar projection is at work in the symbolic conflation of U.S.-led Mars exploration programs with nineteenth-century U.S.-American imperial discourse regarding the Pacific and particularly Hawai’i, as Jens Temmen’s essay “From HI-SEAS to Outer Space: Discourses of Water and Territory in U.S. Pacific Imperialism and Representations of U.S. Mars Colonization” discusses, concluding the section with an outlook on how maritime cultural and legal frameworks are currently being translated to the cosmos.

The third section, entitled “The Aesthetics of Oceangoing,” zooms in on the representational aspects of maritime im/mobility, exploring more closely the aesthetics and artistic strategies that have been used to represent trans-oceanic im/mobilities in literature and art between the turn to the twentieth century and today. The first case study by Sarah Sander, entitled “Precarious Passages: On Migrant Maritime Mobilities, ca. 1907,” returns to the Atlantic. It takes contemporary visual discourse on precarious oceanic passages as a starting point for exploring the medial and material conditions and constitutions of migrant maritime mobilities around 1900. In particular, Sander explores how Alfred Stieglitz’s famous cubist photograph “The Steerage” problematizes the distinctions between first class and steerage in the context of early twentieth-century maritime migration. Navigating to the era of World War II and its aftermath, Annegret Pelz’s essay “High Sea and Sediment: Watermarks in Ilse Aichinger’s Work,” traces the significance of water and the sea in the work of Jewish Austrian author Ilse Aichinger and her struggles with the question of literary language after Auschwitz in light of maritime passages to safety during the terror regime of National Socialism. The essay takes us beyond Anglophone literature but also discusses the influence of earlier maritime works in English on Aichinger’s work.

In the context of contemporary literature, in which the final three essays are located, Nicole Poppenhagen explores the figuring of maritime mobility in Chinese American literature through Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 family narrative China Men, Pam Chun’s 2002 novel The Money Dragon, poetry from Angel Island, and Ginny Lim’s 1991 play Paper Angels. In her article “‘Ocean People’: Pacific (Im)Mobilities in the Chinese American Imaginary,” she reads literary renditions of Pacific crossings by Chinese migrants to the United States as fundamental for the development of Chinese American writing. Turning from migrants to refugees, Alexandra Ganser’s contribution “Going Nowhere: Oceanic Im/Mobilities in North American Refugee Fiction” examines the theoretical implications of maritime im/mobilities by revising Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of “lines of flight” and de/territorialization in light of the forced deterritorializations of asylum-seeking people across the globe. Reading Edwidge Danticat’s 1991 short story “Children of the Sea” and the Canadian novel Dogs at the Perimeter, published in 2011, by Madeleine Thien, Ganser foregrounds maritime refugee literature as a site of negotiating immobilization and the materialities of shipwreck and death, also taking up Achille Mbembe’s concept of a “necropolitics” of the ocean. Finally, Charne Lavery’s article “‘Spoken nowhere but on the water’: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Lost-and-found Languages of the Indian Ocean World” introduces maritime mobilities set in the Indian Ocean to the discussion through a reading of the representation of lascars and their mobile languages in Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 novel Sea of Poppies, the first volume in his widely read Ibis trilogy. Coming full circle, the volume thus ends on the fundamental question of how language itself is affected by oceanic mobilities, with implications for both political and literary re-invention.

Though most of these exemplary critical readings are grounded in Anglophone literatures and cultures, the contributions resonate with the general claim that representations of maritime im/mobilities urge for a corrective logic beyond unsustainable binaries of land and sea, imperial order and wet wilderness (first to be crossed, then to be exploited): qua Kamau Brathwaite, a tidalectic hydro-logics based on the insight that mobilities are fundamental to oceanic, and thus planetary, life and death. From microbes to microplastics and from sailing to cargo ships, our volume responds to such insights from various disciplinary and oceanic angles, showing how the sea has signified a fluid aesthetic as well as a critical potentiality that has inspired writers, artists, and critics to think about the past, present, and future of the oceanic paradox. Bringing the oceanic humanities into dialogue with mobility studies, we hope that this book will inspire scholarship in adjacent fields. In line with Paul Gilroy’s recent notion of “offshore humanism” (Gilroy 2018) and Teresa Shewry’s hopeful vision of possible oceanic ecologies (Shewry 2015), the focus of what follows is to explore how the oceanic imagination in the Anglophone realm has addressed questions of mobility and immobility, of social, political, and environmental justice, and of living with difference, among and between human and nonhuman beings directly or indirectly connected by the sea.