Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities by Newlands, Maxine; Hansen, Claire;

Short description:

This interdisciplinary edited collection explores and analyses the field of the blue humanities through an Australian lens. It will appeal to scholars, educators, and students with an interest in the environmental humanities, ecopolitics, ecocriticism, the blue humanities, cultural geography, environmental history, and the role of place.

Long description:

This interdisciplinary edited collection explores and analyses the field of the blue humanities through an Australian lens. The blue humanities is a way of understanding humanity’s relationship with water and manifestations of what is referred to as the ‘blue’ – reefs, oceans, rivers, creeks, basins, and inland bodies of water.

In its scope, this collection emphasises both the importance of the local and the interconnectedness of Australia with global environmental concerns. It considers how we conceptualise watery spaces and shades of blue in a country where water is often marked by its absence, its ephemerality, its politicisation, and its dangers. Contributors from environmental history, environmental social science, political science, literary studies, creative arts, Indigenous Knowledge, education, and anthropology tackle various entanglements between the human, the more-than-human, and watery Australian spaces in modern culture. It is the first volume to offer a specific, dedicated focus on the intersections between Australian space and the blue humanities, and it offers a pathway for those wishing to explore, critique, and advance ideas around the blue humanities in both research and teaching.

Directly contributing to a growing interdisciplinary field, this is the first book to comprehensively examine the blue in Australia, appealing to scholars, educators, and students working across the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the environmental humanities, ecopolitics, ecocriticism, the blue humanities, cultural geography, environmental history, and the role of place.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

'I am energized by the ways in which this collection contributes to emerging conversations specifically in the Blue Humanities and also in the Environmental Humanities more generally. The multi-disciplinary approach taken by this collection opens the Blue Humanities to more dynamic approaches, which is a necessary task as the field continues to expand in scope. This book works to bring diverse methodological and disciplinary thinking to bear on how we understand the role of “blue” within an Australian context, but its insights extend globally and across all Blue Humanities.'

Sid Dobrin, Professor and Chair in the Department of English, University of Florida, USA

'From the cold Southern Ocean to tropical reefs, precarious inland waterways and the blue within art, education, and digital spaces, this book dives deep into the cultural analysis of Australian waters with impressive literary elegance and analytic scope, finding the blue woven through the most pressing concerns of our times.'

Kate Judith, Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Steve Mentz Introduction: Approaching the Australian blue humanities - from entanglements to Sea Country Part 1: Australian identities through the blue 1 Blue Country: Nurturing meaningful relationships in discontinuous environments 2 Possessing and protecting the Southern Ocean: Connection and mediation in the Antarctic work of Douglas Mawson and Alan Villiers 3 Writing the more-than-human history of northern Australia’s many waters: Environmental history, the blue humanities, and the challenge of entanglement 4 The colour of water Part 2: Sea Country, Blue Country: From the postcolonial blue to the great ocean 5 Sanitary citizenship in the settler colonial city: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia 6 ‘From the viewpoint of their native element’: Diving in the colonial undersea 7 The ‘blue turn’ in contemporary art: Assembling blue methods of research-creation Part 3: Mediating the blue 8 Ecopolitics and ecological imperialism: Activists, artisans, and the Save the Reef campaign 9 Digital blues: Sense of self and the human–nature–technology connection in Australian aquatic environments 10 ‘A dancing creature of crimson and yellow’: Writing the Great Barrier Reef Part 4: Beyond the anthropocentric blue 11 Moving waters, muddy edges: Ibis in Brisbane 12 A whale of a journey: On the connectivity between pygmy blue whales in Indonesia, Australia, and beyond 13 HMS Pandora and the sea: Tracing eighteenth-century Polynesian artefacts and their entanglement with the Pacific Ocean Part 5: Imagining blue futures 14 Colourblindness in/of place: Memory, colonial place, and education’s ignorance of the blue 15 Eco-art and reeling in anthropogenic adversity 16 Waves of cognition: Towards an Australian blue Shakespeare ecosystem Index