In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.
Since the revival of Heathenry in the second half of the 20th century, much has been written about how the spiritual beliefs held by the people of Northern Europe in the early medieval period can be applied to our lives today. You will find books that explain the practicalities of modern Heathen ritual practices and how they compare to those conducted by our ancestors, books on the many deities and spirits and how they are still relevant today, and still more on how texts like the Hávamál can be applied to modern-day life. One area that has not been explored in as much detail up to this point is the relationship between Heathenry and the sea. This seems to be a glaring omission given how important the sea was to our Heathen ancestors. For many of our Scandinavian ancestors seafaring was a way of life. The sea was also important to others such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who took to the waves for a new life in the British Isles, and the Frisians who had an intimate relationship with the sea thrust upon them thanks to the low-lying lands they inhabited. This book explores many aspects of our relationship with water as humans and as Heathens. Drawing on sources from a wide range of disciplines, Heathenry & The Sea examines how water featured in the spiritual world view of our ancestors from the earliest humans, through the Heathen period and in to the Christianisation of Europe, whilst also bringing the discussion right up to date with the experiences of modern Heathens, as well as some of the scientific explanations for these intrinsic connections with water.
"Between 1850 and 1950, the Indian Ocean teemed with people, commodities and ideas ... Sugata Bose finds in these intricate social and economic webs evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia"--Jacket.
Sensual, meditative, and powerfully evocative photographic studies of the ocean by professional surfer Danny Fuller. Danny Fuller's work as a photographer and artist is best understood through his thirty years as a professional surfer. Fuller who is known for riding the waves of North Shore Oahu's famous Pipeline and Maui's treacherous Jaws sees and experiences the ocean in ways intimate and infinite. Fuller's nocturnal seascapes of the worlds most savage and beautiful waves, all captured exclusively by moonlight with slow exposures, share the soulful beauty of the ocean, in meditative, painterly studies of subtle changes of light and color. In the tradition of artists drawn to the sea for inspiration, Fuller expresses a surfer's deep spiritual connection to the ocean and to the meaning of consequence in surfing. The sensual allure of blue mixed with the ominous presence of water, whose scale is epic, reminds us just how minuscule and insignificant we are relative to the powers of the sea.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “Brilliantly breathes life not only into the perils of living at sea, but also into the hidden dangers of domesticity, parenthood, and marriage. What a smart, swift, and thrilling novel.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her stalled-out dissertation on confessional poetry when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. With their two kids—Sybil, age seven, and George, age two—Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four foot sailboat awaits them. The initial result is transformative; the marriage is given a gust of energy, Juliet emerges from her depression, and the children quickly embrace the joys of being at sea. The vast horizons and isolated islands offer Juliet and Michael reprieve – until they are tested by the unforeseen. A transporting novel about marriage, family and love in a time of unprecedented turmoil, Sea Wife is unforgettable in its power and astonishingly perceptive in its portrayal of optimism, disillusionment, and survival.
Winner Of The National Outdoor Book Award For Literature When Beth Leonard and her partner, Evans Starzinger, returned from a three-year, 35,000 mile circumnavigation, they thought they were done with offshore voyaging. But neither realized how irrevocably they had been changed by their experience, nor how irresistible the siren song of the sea would prove. In comparison, life ashore seemed dull and monochrome, and within months, Beth knew she had to go back to sea in order to remain true to the person she had become. Four years later they set out on their 47-foot aluminum sloop Hawk for a journey that lasted six years and took them more than 50,000 miles. They voyaged to Newfoundland, Iceland, Norway, the Caribbean, Ireland, Scotland, Cape Horn, New Zealand, the South Pacific, British Columbia--to the ends of the earth and back. Blue Horizons is Beth Leonard's record of that journey. Compiled from her popular columns in Blue Water Sailing magazine, which she wrote along the way, Blue Horizons is more than an adventure saga, more than the log of an extended passage. As in all great travel writing, it’s the product of an insatiable hunger to explore the world, and in so doing to explore one’s own soul. It is, says Beth, "about pulling your dreams over the horizon to you, one sail change, one course correction at a time." But this is no dreamer's tale. Beth Leonard is both sailor and writer, well qualified to deal with and describe blue water voyaging. Her observations are as sharp as salt air and her prose as informed as it is insightful and entertaining. Beth also brings to Blue Horizons a uniquely feminine perspective, a combination of empathy, charm, and lyric grace. Her pages are suffused with emotion and a strong sense of immediacy. You're with Beth and Evans as Hawk pokes into a lonely and deserted outport on Newfoundland's barren northeast coast, and as they await hurricane Lenny in Antigua. And you sympathize as she burrows deep into her tilting berth, seeking that one, elusive interval of comfort that will bring sleep on a pounding windward passage, only to be dashed awake by the cold shock of a rogue wave spilling into her bunk. Blue Horizons is a rare journey, one to be savored by sailors and armchair adventurers alike. Praise for Blue Horizons: “In her new, wonderful book, Beth Leonard shows us a world in which ‘perfection’ is not bland, easy, escapist comfort in a crowded tropical harbor but a more insecure yet more rewarding existence of constant challenge--cold waters, rocky coves, old fishing villages, demanding seamanship, and the evolution of two sailors trying to manage a boat and also their own relationship.” --John Rousmaniere, author of Fastnet, Force 10, After the Storm, and The Annapolis Book of Seamanship “Let Beth Leonard inspire you to sail around the world, explore the high latitudes, or discover your own capacity for adventure. Each nugget in this ‘dream becomes reality’ series of revelations is worth a thousand pictures.” --Gary Jobson, ESPN sailing commentator, America’s Cup Hall of Famer, and author of Gary Jobson’s Championship Sailing “Blue Horizons chronicles a remarkable adventure through some of the globe’s most inhospitable waters. . . . Every account in this collection provides a taste and sometimes a feast. It is wise, perceptive, wonderful. If you have ever wondered what it might be like to exchange conventional comforts for an adventure not packaged with round-trip airfare, Beth Leonard has written these dispatches to you.” --Don Casey, author of This Old Boat and Don Casey’s Complete Illustrated Sailboat Maintenance Manual
The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. Sea Changes re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study.
