10th EASLCE Symposium : “Sea More Blue”
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1The 10th bi-annual EASLCE symposium took place by the Mediterranean in the South of France. It seemed fitting to invite academics and artists from diverse backgrounds to join the local effort started at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia (UPVD) to launch an extensive interdisciplinary research program called Sea More Blue. Engaging multiple scientific disciplines at once, the Sea More Blue project—with its poetic, grammatically queer formula—sounds a call to depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge to discover and promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. The conference gathered a hundred scholars, novelists, poets, sociologists, ethnologists, teachers, and biologists, who addressed the artistic, intellectual and pedagogical means of promoting blue humanities. The communications were organized in 46 thematic panels, such as “Oceanic Interspecies Dialogues,” “Sympoietic Projects Blurring the Lines Between Human and Marine Lifeforms,” “Blue Hybrids, Mermaids, and Merfolk in Literature and Culture,” “Waterscapes and Blue Issues in Literary Education,” “Navigating Underwater Soundscapes,” “Embodied Practices: Open-Water Swimming, Surfing, and Sailing,” or “Blue Speculative Fiction and Dark Blue Ecocriticism: Colonial Trauma, Ecopoetic Resistance and Intergenerational (In)justice.” The following reviews focus first on general considerations by one of the US founders of the blue humanities, Sidney Dobrin. The next three, by Anna Street, Mathias Klestil and Camille Lavoix, complexify the ethical, philosophical and postcolonial aspects of the discussion. Margarida Vale de Gato’s contribution opens the way to a blue approach to visual arts, while the final three reviews deal with poetic expression and voices: Enaiê Mairê Azambuja and Evy Varsamopoulou explore respectively Marianne Moore and H.D.’s relations to the sea, while keynote poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke gave a bilingual performance of her latest work, Look at This Blue.
Blue Ecocriticism
Keynote speaker – Sidney Dobrin – “In, On, Under : (Post)Human/Ocean”
2Sidney Dobrin, Professor of English at the University of Florida, published Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative in 2021. He opened his talk by inviting the audience to dive into surf culture, and to envision it as a commodified culture. He mobilized the example of surfer Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, where the champion had an infrastructure built that is able to create a “head-high over the shoulder perfect wave.” The gigantic machine runs for 50,000 dollars a day, and is situated 100 miles away from the California coast. What could seem an anecdotal piece of sports trivia is instead a striking analogy of a hyperreal post-structuralist approach to the ocean, begging us to ponder whether a perfect wave truly exists, and whether indigenous waves should also be sought out. Indeed, capitalist economics preserve a particular brand of ocean imaginary. Blue ecocriticism means to trigger further discussion about oceans, waters, and their representations. Even though the very value of academic disciplines has become tied to capitalist endeavors, and even if Bron Taylor quizzically asked “does Ocean really need the humanities?”, the varied fields of research that blue humanities encompass continuously question our “oceanic mindedness.” Three main interrogations were highlighted by Dobrin: how do we rethink the agency of marine organisms? How do we account for the complexity of the ocean? How does technological innovation affect marine life, and more specifically, what kinds of ocean imaginaries does AI contribute to develop?
Philosophical and Postocolonial Aspects
Anna Street – “Hoping Against (Blue) Hope: Interdisciplinary Explorations of a Four-letter Word”
3Anna Street, Theater and Performance Studies lecturer at the University of Le Mans, in France, chose to engage with the notion of “hope” and to question its usual status as a desirable last resort to the ecological crisis. A particularly strong bent of American culture stresses the importance of positive thinking. However, the climate crisis challenges our understanding of hope as a positive notion. Street even went on to ask whether perhaps metaphysical hope and optimism contribute to the ongoing crisis. She argued that radical hope would have to do with acknowledging the scope of the possible outcomes and that hope also relates to the virtuous and moral imperative of lifting ambiguities and illusions. Street thus encouraged a greater awareness of the type of research edited by Andrew T. Brei in Ecology, Ethics, and Hope (2015), where the binary of hope versus despair is articulated to readings and interpretations of biodiversity loss, pollution and climate-induced migration. She also relied on excerpts from Teresa Shewry’s Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (2015) to question the sea’s status as an ultimate symbol of hope. In short, Street’s presentation left the audience with a daunting dilemma: should hope be left behind as a harmfully anthropocentric and even white concept, or is it inextricable from enchantment?
Mathias Klestil – “Marine (E)qualities and Elemental Resistance in Antebellum African American Writing”
4Mathias Klestil, postdoctoral assistant in American Studies, at the University of Klagenfurt, in Germany, chose to address what he coins “marine (E)qualities” via a three-part presentation. He first introduced the audience to elemental ecocriticism, then focused on the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Charlotte Forten, proposing two new ways of re-reading their literature. His understanding of elemental humanities stems from David Macauley’s Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water As Environmental Ideas, published in 2010. Macauley’s considerations on “the elemental places, forces and phenomena of the surrounding and sensuous world” feed into Klestil’s analysis of antebellum African American writing and of its specific relations to the waters of the Atlantic in the U. S. South. Klestil argued that the writings of Douglass and Forten often “interlink marine surroundings through elemental writing with acts of resistance to enslavement and racism.” He went on to demonstrate that a spectrum of mid-nineteenth-century African American responses to Atlantic coastal regions demonstrates strategies of elemental resistance that enhance our understanding of how coastal and marine ecosystems interlink with histories of (anti-)racism.
Camille Lavoix – “Against the Tide of Universal Blue: Some West African Nuances”
5Camille Lavoix is a PhD candidate in Environmental Humanities and she teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at Wuerzburg University, in Germany. Her contribution focused on the first novel of Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi entitled Homegoing (2016). Lavoix chose this historical fiction in order to tackle one of the symposium’s aims, namely, to “look at places that are connected to the sea from a diachronic perspective.” On the backdrop of a theoretical baggage anchored in Black Studies, Black Feminism and Caribbean thought, Lavoix endeavored to assess whether perceiving the world in bluer hues could indeed be a universal goal. Having in mind the history of slavery and the paradox of water as symbolizing both trauma and healing, she endeavored to reveal the lines of intergenerational trauma that run through blue humanities and to question the (in)adequacies of intergenerational justice. She invoked Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) to develop two concluding recommendations regarding postcolonial intergenerational justice. First, that these issues follow the course of a margin-to-center pattern of global attention, rather than the other way around. Second, that justice is a meta-theoretical process, by which the notion of generationality can be expanded to encompass the movement of re-generation that flows through West African literature as an elemental force and energy.
Visual Arts
Margarida Vale de Gato – “Water Specters and Sea Changes by Surrealist Women: Léonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning”
6Margarida Vale de Gato teaches American Studies and Literary Translation at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, and contributed to The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics with an article entitled “Women Poets Breaking the Waves of the Portuguese Sea” (2023). She specializes in analyzing how women surrealists have approached the sea and how they challenge two common tropes: that of the ocean as a predominantly male social construction implying the necessary repression of the fear of nature, and that of the sea as a Freudian symbol of regression and quest for an ever elusive “oceanic feeling.” By interpreting the works of Leonor Fini (1907-1996) and Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) in that light, Vale de Gato showed how female surrealist poets dealing with the ocean and the sea, reposition themselves regarding the misogynistic slant of surrealism, in order “to potentially release the burden of the repressed and the oppressed.” The ecogothic dimension of the two artists’ creations was also discussed, as they both approached Edgar Allan Poe’s writings and status as a literary figure: Leonor Fini indeed drew ten illustrations to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (in a 1966 French publication, following Charles Baudelaire’s translation), while Dorothea Tanning painted his portrait as a “Medusa-cum-Gorgon hovering over the island of his poem(s)” (“Poem lithograph,” 1987).
Poetry
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja – “Marianne Moore’s Taoist Reverie: An Exploration of Sea Creatures in the Tapestry of her Poetic Assemblages”
7Enaiê Mairê Azambuja is a research Associate in Environmental Humanities at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, and studies the impact of Zen on twentieth-century American poetry and its contribution to debates on material ecocriticism and current definitions of ecopoetics. Her first book is entitled The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imagination in Modernist American Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her presentation was centered on the poetry of Marianne Moore (1887-1972), and on the “stark transition” from her earlier to later works. Moore’s Collected Poems (1951) won both the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the National Book Award. Azambuja argued that Moore’s poetry contributes to a deeper understanding of the connections between humanity and the oceanic world. If “A Jelly-Fish” (1909) appears early in the poet’s career, when she was in her valedictory year at Bryn Mawr College, the theme of the sea and its creatures is one to which Moore returns in later poems such as “The Fish” (1921) and “The Paper Nautilus” (1923). Azambuja drew from Jane Bennett’s concept of “agentic assemblages” to coin and qualify the kinds of “hybrid assemblage poetics” that Moore developed. Moore’s Taoist-inflected poetic imagination foregrounds the interdependence and entanglement of diverse agencies developed and analyzed by Jane Bennett via the notion of “vital materialism” (See Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010).
Evy Varsamopoulou – “From the Deeps: H.D.’s Thalassopoetics”
8Evy Varsamopoulou is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, Anglophone and European Romanticism, Philosophical Aesthetics and Ecocriticism at the University of Cyprus. Her most recent publication is an edited volume of essays, Romantic Futures: Legacy, Prophecy, Temporality (Routledge, 2024). She chose the works of the American poetess Hilda Doolittle (H.D. 1886-1961) as a prime example of Mediterranean thalassopoetics. H.D.’s poetry is indeed traversed by the “immense significance of the sea as a realm of alterity.” Her first poetry collection, Sea Garden (1916) contains a long lyrical poem entitled “Sea Gods,” while references to sea mythology and deities pervade the first book of Trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944). Varsamopoulou argued that thalassopoetics of the Mediterranean are foundational to H.D.’s poetic and fictional worlds. She also detailed how such interpretations have been rendered possible by feminist scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who perceived in the poetess’s voice a call to “overcoming the limiting and destructive (modern/secular/monotheistic) disassociation from all else.” By enshrining, inviting and revealing the inhuman, the divine and the otherworldly, H.D.’s thallassopoetics blur the divide between past and present in a timeless and spiritual aesthetic continuum of the sea.
Keynote speaker – Allison Adelle Hedge Coke – Bilingual poetry reading on the seafront, with extracts from Look at this Blue (2022)
9Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is a distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her latest book of poetry is entitled Look at this Blue. This long poem echoes as a love-letter to California, recounting and calling forth its fauna, its flora, its elders and its current inhabitants. The act of remembering California’s genocidal past interweaves with memories of flowers and insects and animals also annihilated via colonization and industrialization. Yet Hedge Coke’s “cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance,” and seeds of literary, philosophical, humanist and ecological hope were on that day sent out from the Mediterranean Sea town of Banyuls, across the Atlantic, and all the way to the Pacific coast of California.
Table des illustrations
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Légende | Allison Adele Hedge Coke, with Bénédicte Meillon reading an exclusive and simultaneous French translation, June 19th, 2024, Banyuls, France. Photograph by Athane Adrahane © |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/24296/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 221k |
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Noémie Moutel, « 10th EASLCE Symposium : “Sea More Blue” », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/24296 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134h4
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