1. Goes beyond understanding shipwrecks as "dead ships" or "underwater cultural heritage" and challenges the assumptions upon which these common tropes are based. 2. Integrates art practice with archaeological and art historical theory to provide - at last - a critical assessment and theoretical backbone for the middle-aged discipline of nautical archaeology. 3. Combines art historical, archaeological, and artistic epistemologies to formulate new ways of conceptualizing and visualizing the uncanniness of shipwrecks. 4. Includes original artworks produced by the author published for the first time.
Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell, and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history, and aesthetic theory. Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or “ecofacts,” this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times, and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical, and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted “art-forms” that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe, and imagine submarine matters.
Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geo-ethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe “Greek” or “Roman” seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture’s valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and research agendas to understand the past human relationship with the sea. This study makes this argument in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2, contrasting intellectual histories of maritime archaeological interpretive approaches common in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, propose that the former perspective – which embodies contemporary and fluid perceptions of culture – is a better theoretical framework for future research. Chapters 3–5 re-interpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent “Phoenician,” “Muslim,” or “Byzantine” seafaring, but the practices of a maritime culture. Key to this section is the author’s method that utilizes superimposed polygons to model patterns of maritime activity, generating centennial results at different scales. Having built the models of a maritime culture’s valorization of the Mediterranean Sea, Chapter 6 contains the first comparisons of these models to other datasets, questioning the relevance of textual media to understand maritime activity, while finding closer analogues with other archaeological corpora. By deconstructing interpretive methods in maritime archaeology, offering a new synthesizing interpretive approach that is scalable and decoupled from past perceptions, and critically examining the applicability of various media to illuminate the past maritime experience, this book will appeal to scholars at various stages of their careers.
How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future. Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities. From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, cultural, historical, and theoretical connections and ecologies to introduce students to the history and theory of water-centric thinking. Comprised of multinational texts and materials, each chapter will provide readers with a range of primary and secondary sources, offering a fresh look at the major oceanic regions, saltwater and freshwater geographies, and the physical properties of water that characterize the Blue Humanities. Each chapter engages with carefully chosen primary texts, including frequently taught works such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Homer’s Odyssey, and Luis Vaz de Camões’s Lusíads, to provide the perfect pedagogy for students to develop an understanding of the Blue Humanities chapter by chapter. Readers will gain insight into new trends in intellectual culture and the enduring history of humans thinking with and about water, ranging across the many coastlines of the World Ocean to Pacific clouds, Mediterranean lakes, Caribbean swamps, Arctic glaciers, Southern Ocean rainstorms, Atlantic groundwater, and Indian Ocean rivers. Providing new avenues for future thinking and investigation of the Blue Humanities, this volume will be ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses engaging with the environmental humanities and oceanic literature.
This book engages with how the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa perform different forms of creolized socio-cultural practices in the contemporary era. Since the precolonial times, India and South Africa have developed commercial relations through sharing clothing materials, minerals, precious stones, and spices. Besides exchanging physical objects, varieties of cultures, traditions, and rituals were also exchanged between these countries. With the emergence of colonization in both these countries as Africans were brought to India as slaves and Indians were taken to South Africa as indentured laborers, a lot of objects like musical instruments, plant seeds, cooking utensils, and hand-woven clothes were carried across the Indian Ocean as cultural memories. With the passage of time, the cultural practices of the Indian Diaspora and African Diaspora got intermixed with the native local cultures of South Africa and India, respectively, and gave birth to porous, fluid, multi-rooted, and creolized cultural practices. This book brings forth some of the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical practices of these communities, and how these performances can expand the archives of creolized cultural practices of Diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean World.
Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux – a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism – object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash‘ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories.
This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse. This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.
Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and horror meet. Employing rigorous analysis, incisive experimentation, and novel invention, this anthology asks about the use that speculation can make of horror and horror of speculation, about whether philosophy is fictional or fiction philosophical, and about the relationship between horror, the exigencies of our world and time, and the future developments that may await us in philosophy itself. From philosophers working on horrific themes, to horror writers influenced by heresies in the wake of post-Kantianism, to artists engaged in projects that address monstrosity and alienation, Diseases of the Head aims at nothing less than a speculative coup d'état. Refusing both total negation and absolute affirmation, refusing to deny everything or account for everything, refusing the posture of critique and the posture of all-encompassing unification, this collection of essays aims at exposition and construction, analysis and creation - it desires to fight for some thing, but not everything, and not nothing. And it desires, most of all, to speak from the position of its own insufficiency, its own partiality, its own under-determinacy, which is always indicative of the practice of thinking, of speculation. Considering themes of anonymity, otherness and alterity, the gothic, extinction and the world without us, the end times, the apocalypse, the ancient and the world before us, and the uncanny or unheimlich, among other motifs, this anthology seeks to articulate the cutting edge which can be found at the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror.
This two-volume set highlights the importance of Iberian shipbuilding in the centuries of the so-called first globalization (15th to 18th), in confluence with an unprecedented extension of ocean navigation and seafaring and a greater demand for natural resources (especially timber), mostly oak (Quercus spp.) and Pine (Pinus spp.). The chapters are framed in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary line of research that integrates history, Geographic Information Sciences, underwater archaeology, dendrochronology and wood provenance techniques. This line of research was developed during the ForSEAdiscovery project, which had a great impact in the academic and scientific world and brought together experts from Europe and America. The volumes deliver a state-of-the-art review of the latest lines of research related to Iberian maritime history and archaeology and their developing interdisciplinary interaction with dendroarchaeology. This synthesis combines an analysis of historical sources, the systematic study of wreck-remains and material culture related to Iberian seafaring from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and the application of earth sciences, including dendrochronology. The set can be used as a manual or work guide for experts and students, and will also be an interesting read for non-experts interested in the subject. Volume 2 focuses on approaches to the study of shipwrecks including a synthesis of dendro-archaeological results, current interdisciplinary case studies and the specialist study of artillery and anchors.
