The Blue Humanities

Question 1

What’s George Eliot’s work mentioned in Session 2

Answer 1

Little Fable with a Great Moral

Question 2

Facts about George Eliot’s “Little Fable with a Great Moral”

Answer 2

• published February 12, 1847, Coventry Herald and Observer
• very short (2 pages)
• about two hamadryads (wood nymphs) and their engagement with the world
• central trope = water (lake)
• Hieria & Idione (narcissus)

Question 3

What’s William Wordsworth’s poem called?

Answer 3

‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’ (Calais, 1802)

Question 4

What does Hester Blum mean with “The sea is not a metaphor”?

Answer 4

Blum cautions that many fail to incorporate the sea as a real, experienced social arena. Instead, she argues for a perspective that ‘‘draws from the epistemological structures provided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simultaneously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary, and promise’’ and that is thereby ‘‘attentive to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world.’’

Question 5

Name some examples of The Sea in English Literature

Answer 5

• Daniel Defoe “Robinson Crusoe” (1719)
• Jonathan Swift “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726)
• Herman Melville “Moby-Dick or The Whale” (1851)
• Homer “The Odyssey” (c. 8th century BC)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100-1200 BC)

Question 6

What’s the early phase of The Maritime Turn?

Answer 6

• interest in the ocean as a region with histories, cultural values, and political meanings
• attempt to go beyond terrestrial history
• to draw attention to the role the oceans have played for human history
• hardly any acknowledgement of other, non-European cultural engagements with the sea
• little sense of the ocean as a body of water, and as a global ocean

Question 7

What’s the Black Atlantic? And who is Paul Gilroy?

Answer 7

• written by Paul Gilroy
• English sociologist and cultural studies scholar
• studied with Stuart Hall
• contributor to The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (1982)
• founding director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London

Question 8

The book “Black Atlantic”

Answer 8

• addresses one small area in the grand consequence of this historical conjunction – the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world.
• Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe constitute a single zone.
• Double consciousness
• slavery trade as well as trade of goods
• ongoing effects of that exchange remain the constituting factor in a discursive economy that continues to dominate the social and political practices of the modern world in societies as diverse as the United States, Brazil, Britain and in the independent colonies of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas
• that first era of mercantilism and expansion when the principal cargo was the bodies of black Africans.
• idea that there exists a culture which is African, American, Caribbean, and British, all at once.

Question 9

What is the Black Atlantic synopsis?

Answer 9

The Black Atlantic uses the transnational concept of the diaspora to explore the migrations, discontinuities, fractal patterns of exchange and hybrid glory that join the black cultures of America, Britain, and the Caribbean to one another and to Africa.

Question 10

What is Blue Humanities?

Answer 10

• Gilroy: bodies of enslaved Africans as basis of economic framework
• Christina Sharpe (2016) about the residence time of sodium in sea water
• Hester Blum (2019) on “the still-present atomized bodies of enslaved and jettisoned Africans during the Middle Passage”
• recognition of the close relationship between modern western culture and the sea

Question 11

What is New Materialism?

Answer 11

• New materialists refuse to distinguish ‘between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level’ (Coole and Frost 9).
• Their focus is on the enmeshed rather than distinct condition of these categories

Question 12

Bodies of Water by Neimanis?

Answer 12

circulation between biospheric and geophysical aqueous bodies evidences water not only as a ‘thing in itself’ (lake, snowcap, drainage ditch), nor only as that which primarily comprises other bodies (swamp cabbage, human, beluga whale – all mostly water), but also as a material medium of communication. For humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, the lifeworld and our environment – drinking, urinating, sweating, transfusing, ejaculating, siphoning, sponging, weeping. Human bodies are thus very literally implicated in other animal, vegetable and planetary bodies that in a material sense course through us, replenish us, and draw upon our own bodies as their wells.