Abstract
This collection of 11 essays addresses gaps in scholarly attention to the Gothic and the sea, despite their evident intersections. In particular, since much existing scholarship on nautical and coastal Gothic has focussed on the Atlantic world, it valuably foregrounds the regions and cultural productions of the ‘Oceanic South’, defined as Indigenous Oceania, the colonised and decolonised South, and Antarctica. There is more ocean, the editors point out in the introduction, in the southern hemisphere than the northern.
The collection responds to the ‘oceanic turn’ in the humanities, and particularly to theorising and historicising that address colonialism and its local and global impacts, now and in the past, on human communities and the more-than human, including waters and lands, in the Oceanic South. Between them these colonised and decolonised regions have produced a highly varied range of imaginative works, often dealing with contrasting epistemologies, as many of the chapters develop. Allison Craven and Diana Sandars note the potential contradictions of applying the traditionally land-bound lenses of the Gothic to the sea, and the tensions of using a literary practice primarily associated with Europe and imperialism – the Gothic – for decolonial approaches, but understand them as ‘generative’ if not completely reconcilable.
A central argument set out in the editors’ introduction posits oceans as uncanny spaces, an idea much used in Gothic methodologies. Drawing on one way of interpreting Freud's unheimlich, translatable as ‘unhomely’ and/or ‘uncanny’, the ocean is an ‘unstable home’. As a continually moving and never-settling medium, ocean waters are useful for expressing or thinking about uncanny instabilities in relation to ‘the shifting tensions of colonial and postcolonial histories’ and climate changes (p. 7). These two realities have made the Oceanic South uncanny, for example by defamiliarising it as home, or by dehoming, in one way or another, people who live here. This idea is picked up in the first essay in the collection, ‘Knowing the Uncanny Ocean’ by Elspeth Probyn, who uses it as a framing for examination of three scenarios including the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on crews aboard ships.
Chapter 2, by Adrian Danks, examines Peter Weir's 1977 The Last Wave as Australian Gothic, arguing that the film's treatments of water in a variety of forms produces Gothic effects. Danks also notes the film's colonialist perspectives, including in its handling of Aboriginal belief systems, and discusses the limits of applying Gothic as a lens which only works from the colonisers’ perspective. Australian Gothic film is also the subject of Craven's individual chapter on ‘Vampire Hydrology and Coastal Australian Cinema’ (Chapter 11), which insightfully observes vampires’ watery properties and explores their significance. Craven draws on concepts of ‘amphibious scholarship’ and ‘saturation’ to trace how Australian coastal vampire film Daybreakers revises the traditions of Victorian vampire ‘amphibiana’ such as Dracula.
Still working in Australian contexts, chapters 3, 4, and 8 contribute perspectives that diversify the collection from literary and film studies. Chapter 3, Kate Judith's ‘The Other Alongside: Suburban Mangroves and the Postcolonial Swampy Gothic’, is one of the most persuasive essays in the collection at linking Gothic tropes and aesthetics to coastal waters, through examination of mangroves along the edges of the Cooks River. Using material criticism and eloquently evoking the mangrove environment, Judith reads the mangroves and their strange grotesquery (shape, smell, gloom) as monstrous returns of what colonial violence had destroyed, and as agents that resist colonial and anthropocentric control by ‘insisting upon their own muddy and accommodating values’ (p. 55). Leah Barclay and Briony Luttrell's contribution in Chapter 4 presents their sound art works Acidification and Annihilation. These works produce a Gothic affect of disquiet through the silences and uncanny soundscape of the damaged Great Barrier Reef by ‘inton[ing] the haunting demise of the Reef for which the empathy of listeners is sonically elicited’ (p. 66). In Chapter 8, Lynda Hawryluk beautifully presents and discusses her ‘Seacoast Suite’ of ekphrastic poetry inspired by photographs of the Ballina coastline.
Hawryluk's final poem discussed, ‘To the Sea, To the Deep Blue Sea’, resonates with Charne Lavery's discussion in Chapter 6, ‘Multispecies and Multispirited Seas’, of the lure of the sea and the processes of consumption, decomposition and transformation that recombine human bodies into the more-than-human. Lavery examines two South African stories about the pull of submersion in the sea, into an ocean world that is both historicised and mythicised, haunted by (colonial) ghosts and populated by water beings and divinities. She notes that while Gothic characteristics are evident in the literatures of oceanic south cultures they are ‘inflected and complicated by […] historical and geographic contexts, histories, myths, and cosmologies’ (p. 87). Lavery's chapter exemplifies the recurrent attention of this collection to the importance of not imposing Western ecological views where they do not belong.
Chapter 5, ‘Hydrocolonial Gothic’, by Isabel Hofmeyr, astutely develops her influential concept of ‘hydrocolonialism’ for Gothic contexts. Like Danks, Hofmeyr makes the point that Gothic dread is a coloniser's perspective, and compares Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘The Merry Men’ with the historical story of nineteenth-century South African resistance leader Makhanda. While Stevenson's coastal Gothic tale disenchants and empties coastal waters, the latter example presents a culture that accommodates and sustains them. Ian Conrich's ‘Aquatic Kiwi Gothic’ (Chapter 7) is also particularly interested in coasts. He discusses a number of texts about uneasy Gothic shores and the interrelations of littoral environments with history and culture, including how they are legible differently depending on whether they are understood from Pāhekā or Māori perspectives.
In Chapter 9, Seán Cubitt examine Barnum's ‘Feejee mermaid’ as an uncanny figure that confuses the biological real with the enchanted mythical. The ugliness of the faked mermaid body exposes a ‘“truth” behind the glamour of the mermaid myth’ (p. 137), while also representing a cynical Orientalist and commercial overwriting of what mermaids meant in Pacific belief systems. In Chapter 10, Sandars analyses the Disney animation Moana. As a decolonial effort on Disney's part, the film interfaces between Disney Gothic and Pacific histories. However, in Sanders’ reading, the film is, Gothically, ‘shaped by textual ruptures arising from a fraught “double vision” of Oceania’ (p. 149), as Disney conventions conflict with the film's efforts at attunement to Oceanic epistemologies.
These summaries give a flavour of the variety and creativity with which this volume approaches its topic. The selection of contributors to the collection fruitfully encourages scholars and artistic practitioners with ‘watery’ backgrounds to consider Gothic perspectives, and those with more firmly Gothic backgrounds to consider intersections with the sea and the blue humanities. The dominant focus is on Australia, the subject of five of the chapters, including its coasts and inland waterways; others address Aotearoa New Zealand, southern Africa, and the Pacific Islands. A single collection about such a vast region as the Oceanic South could not cover every area, and it is to be hoped that this volume will inspire other scholars and editors to future projects that showcase the value for environmental humanities, blue humanities, and decolonial studies of pairing the Gothic and the sea.
