Stafford Trüper Wolf (eds.), Moral Seascapes. On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Maritime Emergency (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Sea is All Around Us - Exhibition catalogue and Essay
The Sea is All Around us is a multi-layered event which creates a memorable experience for those visiting the Dome Gallery and the Mission to Seafarers in Melbourne’s Docklands. The event acknowledges and raises awareness of the often difficult and dangerous working lives and journeys of seafarers by making visible their role in transporting commodities, materials and objects to and from Australia’s shores. This installation at the Dome Gallery in the Mission to Seafarers in Melbourne’s Docklands marks the third stage of an ongoing research project which seeks to reveal the ‘social life’ of souvenirs. Beyond their representational role souvenirs also trigger intangible, affective qualities – reminders of journeys and places, new associations with tastes, sounds and people, and thereby becoming objects which focus and hold memories. This installation invites seafarers and visitors to participate in a global project which aims to witness sea journeys and trace the mobile life of seafarers and souvenirs. For a fortnight in May 2015, the Dome Gallery became an architectural large scale compass, with the circular floor marking the intersection of its latitude and longitude (37 º 49'21" S 144º 57'03"E). Over these two weeks the Dome Gallery was inscribed with marks recording journeys made by seafarers, recording destination and departure ports, home lands and waterways, and in doing so making visible a small segment of the global patterns of seafaring. Custom-made souvenirs designed for the installation are given to seafarers as gestures of welcome and a memento of their visit. The souvenirs originating in Poland continue their journey by sea, to destinations beyond the Dome becoming part of the global network of seafaring, with an invitation for seafarers to record their future journeys using QR code scanning technologies. It is hoped that by releasing the 200 limited edition souvenirs accompanying the seafarers the mobile life of souvenirs and seafarers will also become visible. Like messages in bottles they leave our shores, becoming ambassadors, representing the Dome Gallery at the Mission to Seafarers, the waters of Port Phillip Bay, Australia’s red soil and vegetation, and carrying memories of visiting Melbourne.
“‘A World Embracing Sea’: The Oceans as Highway, 1604-1815”
Proceedings of the World Marine Millennial Conference 2000, ed. Daniel Finamore (Salem, MA and Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 102-114, 2004
From the passing of the Elizabethan Age at the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the Napoleonic wars just after the end of the eighteenth century, European commerce began to flow along oceanic highways that were truly global in extent. It was a period of history that encompassed an enormous number of experiences, developments, and nationalities. Just in European terms alone, the "Oceans as Highways" embraced the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English maritime experiences, as well as those of Sweden, Denmark, Russia, and the United States and a host of smaller nationalities, city-states, and principalities. It was an age characterized by what historians today refer to as "mercantilism," in which maritime trade was dominated by a rapidly expanding volume of luxury and consumer commodities such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, fish, and grain. It was equally an age when oceanic highways permitted the rapid growth of the traffic in African slaves to the New World and when European powers struggled increasingly -not only on land but also on the sea itself -to control and use the wealth that traveled on these oceanic highways. To say something reasonably coherent about such a diversity of material within a brief chapter is a daunting challenge. Therefore, I will explore several themes within the narrower framework of the Newfoundland fishery, fisher society, and fish trade during the eighteenth century. Like so many other oceanic activities, this is one in which all aspects of oceanic commerce are manifest: oceans as highways; the struggle for control of the commerce on those highways; the national and ethnic diversity of the shipping, markets, and individuals engaged in oceanic commerce, and above all the strategies and considerations necessary to succeed in oceanic commerceare manifest. Through this admittedly narrow window into the past, it is possible to explore the way in which the oceans functioned as highways for ships, people, and commodities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is the contention of this article that historians of the nineteenth century need to think about notions of empire, nation, and race in the context of the social production of space. More specifically, it posits that the moving space of the steamship functioned as a particularly important site in which travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds. Supporting this contention the article pays close attention to the journeys of J. T. Wilson, a young Scottish medical student who between 1884 and 1887 made three voyages to China and one to Australia. For it was in the space of the ship, literally moving along the routes of global trade, that Wilson forged a particular kind of British identity that collapsed the spaces of empire, elided differences among Britons and extended the boundaries of the British nation.
This Watery World: Humans and the Sea
In this wonderfully wide-ranging volume, Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra have given us a fine collection of maritime riches. From reflections on the ocean as metaphor to shark documentaries and Jaws, from Hemingway’s organic ecology to Melville’s tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, This Watery World reminds us that—onshore and inland—we are all in the grip of our images and interactions with the sea. When I put this book down I was reminded of the Hyderabadi poet Sarojini Naidu: “The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all.” —Professor Ashton Nichols, editor of Romantic Natural Histories and author of The Poetics of Epiphany and The Revolutionary “I”
Avoiding Equally Extravagance and Parsimony": The Moral Economy of the Ocean Steamship
Technology and Culture, 2003
and a member of the "Ocean Steamship" project. His research interests include Joseph Conrad's sea literature, in particular its relation to the Blue Funnel Line. They thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the generous financial support that made the research for this article possible, and their colleagues Ben Marsden, Will Ashworth, and Anne Scott for their intellectual and moral support throughout. Thanks go also to Joe Clarke for his guidance on Hawthorn Leslie and the compound engine. The archivists at the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the Liverpool Central Record Office provided much help, as did librarians and staff elsewhere, notably at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and Ullet Road Unitarian Chapel in Liverpool.
Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2020
Over the last decade, a wave of ocean-themed exhibitions has swelled in international and interdisciplinary contexts. Ranging from large-scale permanent displays in national museums of maritime and natural history to transient exhibitions of contemporary art and international biennials, this surge of curatorial activity corresponds to increasing public and scientific awareness about the ecological devastation of the Earth's oceans. Indeed, the 'oceanic turn' in exhibitions parallels the emergent scholarly field of the Blue Humanities (Winkiel 2019: 1). 1 This special issue investigates how curatorial practice can uniquely contribute to understanding the complex relationships between ocean ecosystems, marine wildlife and human activity at this time of environmental crisis. Together, the contributors critically reflect on this exhibitionary turn to the sea in its multivalent forms and begin to chart the heritage of this practice. As such, these texts make a marine-focused contribution to the nascent field of curatorial and museum studies concerned with ecology and sustainability, examining the oceanic Anthropocene through the lens of exhibitions. 2 The most recent iteration of the Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times (2019), curated by Ralph Rugoff, was marked by an overall disastrous tone that responded to surrounding international circumstances in which climate change played a major role. Notably, a strong oceanic thread ran