by Maurya Wickstrom
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Cloth: 978-0-472-07860-8
Paper: 978-0-472-05860-0
eISBN: 978-0-472-90714-4 (OA)
When the Ocean Holds the Stage is a work in which Moby-Dick and Melville’s ocean dramaturgy is the deep thru-current and archipelagic structure, forming his brilliant watery excavation of the forces of containment and continentalization, capitalization, racialization, enslavement, species destruction, and white Christian supremacism. As such, it is an original and challenging political and aesthetic engagement with Melville and Moby-Dick. Melville’s Benito Cereno, Homer’s The Odyssey, and Dereck Walcott’s Omeros are also central studies. Wickstrom argues that the ocean and the ship emerge in these texts as new kinds of performance stages on which there is a unique freedom to bring critical thought to bear on many harmful systems, and to offer visions of ways to live differently. Introducing new practices in academic writing, Wickstrom works against the constraints of linear argumentation and toward archipelagic and poetic openness. Gatherings replace chapters and, in addition to the main texts, bring many artists, historical situations, contemporary crises, and political proposals into loose, archipelagic correspondences. Finally, the book is an important contribution from Theatre and Performance Studies to the vital and broad coalition of scholars, artists, and activists whose focus is on water.
Maurya Wickstrom is Professor Emeritus in the Theatre and Performance Program at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.
“A literary achievement of Moby-Dick scholarship, When the Ocean Holds the Stage seduces the reader into the subaqueous zones of innovation and experimentation around the metaphor of the ship as stage. Wickstrom is a siren, enchanting the skeptical reader into the undercurrents of archipelagic thinking.”
— Mary Joseph, Pratt Institute“Maurya Wickstrom’s When the Ocean Holds the Stage is a striking study in the blue humanities. It follows theatrical recontextualizations of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno and related works across oceanic and riverine worlds until it becomes an archipelagic gathering of theory, performance, literature, and visual art. Her prose stages each scene in a sensorial, kinetic style. Correspondences accumulate. Bodies gather where currents meet. Texts shift form. What emerges is a shared critique of capitalism, anchored in the institution and afterlives of slavery.”
— Jaimey Hamilton Faris, University of Hawai’iLicense: CC BY-NC
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