Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World
Résumé
This book examines how seas and oceans have shaped and reshaped cultural identities, spurred stories of reunion and separation and redefined entire nations. It seeks to explore how entire communities have crossed seas and oceans, voluntarily or not, to settle in foreign lands and undergo identity, cultural and literary transformations. The topic under study falls under the category of “oceanic studies” that explain how the seas and oceans have affected various political (narratives of exploration, cartography), international (maritime law), identity (insularity) and literary issues (survival narratives, fishing stories).
This book is divided into three main sections that deal respectively with the history of cartography and management of the seas and oceans, the history of ocean crossings between the 17th and 21st centuries and the more literary rewritings of the seas and oceans, ranging from narratives about the middle passage and the black Atlantic to climate fiction, a science-fiction category which focuses on the interaction between humans and their environment.
Chapters can be read independently and offer readers from all horizons the possibility to investigate the topic at hand and discover new approaches to maritime spaces. They also offer a view on how early 21st-century readers imagine and represent the seas and oceans, in an age of rising concern about maritime environments.