Ana Sobral & Johannes Riquet

Oceanic Encounters: A Book Project 

“Beaches have to be crossed by both those who come first and those who come after” (Greg Dening)
“We are the sea, we are the ocean” (Epeli Hau’ofa)

More than two thirds of our planet’s surface consist of water, yet Western thought has been strongly biased towards the land. This double paper contributes to recent “human geographies of the ocean” (Anderson and Peters) and “blue humanities” (Mentz) by considering the significance of oceans for the creation of our globalized world and discussing oceanic spaces as the loci of key historical transformations and cultural movements. Intended as an introduction of a joint book project, our paper examines European oceanic travels, the moments when different cultures met on the shore or at sea, and the various forms of cross-cultural exchange that arose from these encounters.

A starting point for the discussions in this book project is first-hand accounts like Christopher Columbus’s letters from the New World and James Cook’s Pacific diaries. Firstly, we discuss the complex phenomenologies of arrival in unfamiliar spaces these texts negotiate. Secondly, we explore the literary and cultural transformation of oceanic travels. Thus, we discuss classical texts by authors like Shakespeare, Stevenson, Melville, and others, as well as postcolonial and indigenous oceanic memories in fiction, cinema, poetry, painting, drama, and songs.

Our discussions will be framed by theoretical reflections on transculturation, spatial mobility and cultural (mis)communication by thinkers like Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. In this paper, we wish to present selected case studies from our planned book. We will examine in detail the language used to construct the ocean as a distinctive space where boundaries are crossed, where notions of self and other become of central concern, and where cultural certainties are both established and dissolved.