Abstract
This book engages with hydrocriticism as a critical and theoretical approach that focuses on social realities and forms of domination in which bodies of water play a fundamental role, as the medium for reaching and controlling people, lands, and/or natural resources. As environmental variables, bodies of water generate specific strategies for the exercise of power and resistance, and for the sustainability of life. Concurrently, collective imaginaries integrate in multiple ways liquid and territorial spaces and develop creative ways to articulate these domains both in material and symbolic manners.
Today the mythical Mediterranean is brutally vernacularized in the fraught journeys of anonymous men, women, and children migrating across its waters: Caliban returns as an illegal immigrant, and Prospero’s island, midway between Naples and Tunis in the sixteenth-century drama, becomes modern-day Lampedusa.
—Iain Chambers
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Notes
- 1.
Hofmeyr also refers to the notion of water as “‘an informed material’ implicated in hydronationalism, struggles around citizenship, settler hydrologies, and hydrocosmologies” (Dockside Rreading16), concepts that could be used to analyze particular instances of national histories in countries like Mexico, Bolivia, the Caribbean nations and so on.
- 2.
As indicated by Hofmeyr, “there is now an exciting repertoire of scholarship exploring these themes: critical oceanic studies, coastal and hydrocritical approaches, elemental and atmospheric methods” (17).
- 3.
On the cultural history of oceans see Mack.
- 4.
In this respect see Hulme.
- 5.
Hofmeyr indicates that “Geographers and anthropologists have thickened understandings of water as an ‘informed material’ implicated in hydronationalism, struggles around citizenship, settler hydrologies, and hydrocosmologies” (Dockside Reading 16).
- 6.
On the Atlantic Ocean and its role in World War II cfr. Faulkner y Patalano.
- 7.
On disciplinary knowledge in the context analyzed in this pages, see Carter.
- 8.
Steinberg indicates, after Massey, For Space, that “the space and time of the sea are inseparable from each other, as its space is continually constituted through dynamic reformations in time, and vice versa” (“Of Other Seas” 165 n4).
- 9.
In this respect, in addition to Poppenhagen and Temmen see Wilson. It is worth noting that this line of inquiry follows a more historical and political direction than the one present, most of the time, in hydrocriticism. However, Atlantic and Pacific studies share the interest in analyzing oceanic discourses (Poppenhagen and Temmen 152).
- 10.
Such a perspective connects in many ways with the “mobility turn,” a perspective that emerged in the field of the social sciences in the 1990s in order to incorporate critical and theoretical models for the interpretation of social movement, migration, tourism, transportation, voyages and so on, which were particularly prominent at the end of the century. However, this line of inquiry is mostly referred to territorial displacements. According to Cresswell, mobility lies “at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities, and the micro-geographies of everyday life” (551). See also, for a sociological perspective on mobility, Sheller and Urry. For a more diversified critical approach, see Warf and Arias.
- 11.
“We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual re-formation, and that a ‘wet ontology’ can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits” (Steinberg and Peters, “Wet ontologies” 247).
- 12.
On Schmitt see Connery.
- 13.
According to Perera, “In Western imaginaries from Homer to Conrad, the sea is overwhelmingly the domain of masculine endeavor […] In foundational colonial narratives such as Robinson Crusoe, the ocean signifies as a borderless domain wherein the castaway and the sailor, as white heroic, masculinized figures, exemplify and assert the moral attributes of imperial racial virtue, to end by making for themselves new homes and new worlds, at the end of their voyaging (60).
- 14.
As indicated by Allan Sekula, contemporary novels reproduce the same model by which “[white] men sacrifice themselves at sea so that [white] women can nurture civilized values, or even revive civilization itself” (Sekula 26–27, Perera 61).
- 15.
Economic, political, and social histories continuously challenge previous perceptions of the land/sea connections. Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949) is an indispensable book in the recognition of the importance of oceanic encounters and the consolidation of hegemony. Carl Schmitt Land and Sea. A World Historical Meditation (1954) is a key work for the exploration of Eurocentrism and ideological interpretations of this matter in the context of World War II politics, and beyond. Paul Gilroy’s highly influential Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) constitutes a groundbreaking analysis of the crucial significance of the Atlantic Ocean in the consolidation of modern designs of the world, at economic, political, and cultural levels. He emphasizes the centrality of slavery, race, and diasporic movements in the modern world, and the cultural hybridization that takes place through oceanic journeys that facilitate human, material, and symbolic exchanges.
- 16.
For Pugliese, the term “geocorpography” “bring[s] into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire” (Pugliese 1, Perera 60).
- 17.
The social and religious meanings of water in the pre-Hispanic world have been analyzed by historians and anthropologists alike. In the Inca Empire, aside from its inclusion in rituals related to the celebration of life, the sustenance of agriculture and the human life in general, water was also crucial in death rituals, offerings, and oblations, thus becoming a key element in community celebrations and social organization. The management of water was also one of the constant architectural challenges (particularly the design and building of terraces, aqueducts, bridges, reservoirs, etc.) As indicated by Bray, the management of water greatly contributed to define power relations and social identity among the Incas. In the case of the Aztecs, “As is well-known, the hills were the containers of water, shrines were also located at springs and other water features, and the control of weather and agriculture was crucial to [this] culture” (Umberger 110). The same is true in Maya societies, where hydraulic methods and the management of rain, flows, evaporation, drainage, and the like, speak eloquently about the awareness of the importance and communal relevance of water and the ability to gather it, redirect it, storage it, and utilize it wisely (Ertsen and Wouters). On these topics see Lucero and Fash.
- 18.
“In the daytime, weather permitting, slaves were brought on deck for exercise or for “dancing” (forced jumping up and down). At this time, some captains insisted that the sleeping quarters be scraped and swabbed by the crew. In bad weather the oppressive heat and noxious fumes in the unventilated and unsanitary holds caused fevers and dysentery, with a high mortality rate. Deaths during the Middle Passage, caused by epidemics, suicide, “fixed melancholy,” or mutiny, have been estimated at 13 percent. So many bodies of dead or dying Africans were jettisoned into the ocean that sharks regularly followed the slave ships on their westward journey. The Middle Passage supplied the New World with its major workforce and brought enormous profits to international slave traders. At the same time, it exacted a terrible price in physical and emotional anguish on the part of the uprooted Africans; it was distinguished by the callousness to human suffering it developed among the traders” (The Encyclopedia Britannica).
- 19.
On these topics see Moraña, Liquid Borders. Migration as Resistance.
- 20.
With respect to the Pacific Ocean, see the important collection of articles edited by Christina H. Lee and Ricardo Padron, where contributors analyze the encounters and intermixing that took place in the region in Early Modern times between Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians, and the role of ethnicity and gender in social and cultural dynamics. On the history of the Atlantic Ocean see Bailyn, and Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman. For an ample study on oceanic history see Rozwadowski and for an elaborated analysis of maritime social and political significance, cfr. Phillip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean.
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Moraña, M. (2022). Introduction: Texts, Textures, and Water Marks. In: Moraña, M. (eds) Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08903-9_1
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