Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks

Abstract

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough.—Herman Melville,Moby-Dick; or, The WhaleFamiliar Landscapes are Today Challenged by Illicit Sea Journeys. The Southern Shores of Occidental Modernity are beached by the uninvited guest, by the arrival of histories and cultures that exceed its desires and augment its fears. Like a nemesis from the sea, the interrogative presence of the migrant, who announces planetary processes that are notoursto manage and define, draws Europe and the rest of the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself. In Isaac Julien's video installationWestern Union: Small Boats(2007), the cruel passage of northward migration—across the inhospitable desert and perilous sea—proposes a dramatic poetics that seeks to force apart the conclusive framings of existing political, cultural, and historical narratives. Contorted black bodies gasping in the foam, abandoned on the beach in silver body bags among the sunbathers or writhing on the palace floors of European hierarchies replay the black Atlantic, memories of slavery, and racial oppression in the modern-day Mediterranean.