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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210505T093000
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URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/sea-to-sky/
SUMMARY:From Sea to Sky: Early Modern Horizons
DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, May 5\, 2021\n\n9:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PDT\n\nZoom 
 Meeting\n\n–Organized by Vin Nardizzi\, The University of British Columb
 ia\, and Bronwen Wilson\, University of California\, Los Angeles\n\nCo-spo
 nsored by University of California Humanities Research Institute\n\nThis s
 ymposium is one outcome of a UBC and UCLA Collaborative Research Mobility 
 Award. Its long-time collaborators\, Dr. Vin Nardizzi (English\, UBC) and 
 Dr. Bronwen Wilson (Art History\, UCLA)\, are key researchers in the inter
 national collaborative project “Earth\, Sea\, Sky”. Wilson is also one
  of three principal investigators in the UCHRI project: On the sea and coa
 stal ecologies: early modern pasts and uncertain futures. We are grateful 
 to our collaborators and these institutions for their support.\n\nChair: V
 in Nardizzi is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language a
 nd Literatures at UBC. With Tiffany Jo Werth\, he recently edited Premoder
 n Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto 2019)\, and he is 
 completing a book manuscript called "Marvellous Vegetables: Plants and Poe
 try in the English Renaissance."\n\nModerator: Laura Hutchingame\, Graduat
 e Student\, Art History\, UCLA\n\nRobert N. Watson is Distinguished Profes
 sor of English at UCLA. He is the author of Back to Nature: The Green and 
 the Real in the Late Renaissance (2006). His most recent monograph\, 2019\
 , is Cultural Evolution and its Discontents: Cognitive Overload\, Parasiti
 c Cultures\, and the Humanistic Cure.\n\nAyasha Guerin is Assistant Profes
 sor of Black Diaspora Studies\, Department of English\, UBC. Her presentat
 ion springs from a book project\, which argues that the waterfront has ser
 ved the frontlines of crisis for racialized communities since European col
 onization and trans-Atlantic slave trade. A related article\, “Shared Ro
 utes of Mammalian Kinship: Race and Migration in Long Island Whaling Diasp
 oras\,” is forthcoming in Island Studies Journal.\n\nJoseph Monteyne is 
 Associate Professor\, History of Art\, at UBC. His forthcoming book is Med
 ia Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches\, Scraps\, and Spectres (Univ
 ersity of Toronto Press\, late 2021\, early 2022).\n\nBronwen Wilson teach
 es art history at UCLA where she is Director of the Center for 17th- and 1
 8th Studies and the Clark Library. Her new book project\, Otherworldly Nat
 ures: the subterranean imminence of stone\, probes artistic and ecological
  engagement with quarries\, riverbeds\, and lithic formations from the mid
 dle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth.\n\nSched
 ule\n\n9:30 a.m.\nOpening remarks\, Vin Nardizzi\n\n9:35 a.m.\nRobert N. W
 atson\, University of California\, Los Angeles\n“Donne on the Shore”\n
 \n9:50 a.m.\nAyasha Guerin\, The University of British Columbia\n“Echolo
 cation\, Race and Migration”\n\n10:05 a.m.\nDiscussion\n\n10:25 a.m.\nGr
 aduate Student Presentations\n\nNicolyna Enriquez\, University of Californ
 ia\, Los Angeles\n“Surrounded by Sea: Graffiti and Ship Imagery on Creta
 n Church Wall Paintings”\n\nAbigail Berry\, University of California\, L
 os Angeles\n“Fluid Boundaries of the Invisible: Quarantine in Fifteenth-
 Century Europe”\n\nCynthia Fang\, University of California\, Los Angeles
 \n“Imaginary Voyages: a Sailing Ship at the Aviary in Yuanming Yuan”\
 n\n10:45 a.m.\nDiscussion\n\n11:00 a.m.\nBreak\n\n11:10 a.m.\nBronwen Wils
 on\, University of California\, Los Angeles\n“The Sea\, the Line\, and t
 he Limits of Perspective”\n\n11:25 a.m.\nJoseph Monteyne\, The Universit
 y of British Columbia\n“Equivocal Space and the Problem of the Sea in Bl
 ake and Fuseli’s Images of Dante’s Cocytus”\n\n11:40 a.m.\nDiscussio
 n\n\n12:00 p.m.\nProgram concludes\n\n\n\n Abstracts\n\nRobert N. Watson\
 , University of California\, Los Angeles\n“Donne on the Shore”\n\nFor 
 the 17th century poet and preacher John Donne\, as for many sailors of his
  day\, the coastline was frequently a matter of life and death. Donne famo
 usly wrote that “no man is an island.” My argument is that Donne perce
 ived every person as a shoreline\, always at risk -- from tempest or just 
 from the tides of time -- of becoming reduced to “a clod…washed away b
 y the sea” to death.\n\nDonne persistently associated the passage from l
 and to sea with the passage from life to death. The key question\, as Donn
 e moved from his egotistic sensualist love-poems to his religious hymns\, 
 was whether to understand the departure from land as drowning and oblivion
 \, or instead as a baptismal ablution preparing him for salvation. Steppin
 g off a dock entailed a leap of faith\, a non-rational trust that a meanin
 gful immortality of something like his fiercely-guarded self would survive
  in that cold\, swirling ocean.\n\nFor Donne and other writers of the peri
 od in that island nation (such as Shakespeare and Lovelace)\, land was per
 ceived as a stable human habitation\, while oceans epitomized the chaotic 
 churn of matter and motion that the revival of classical skepticism and at
 omism had made uncomfortably evident to many Renaissance thinkers.\n\nDonn
 e’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning\,” with its renowned conceit o
 f parting lovers as the legs of a draftsman’s compass\, struggles with d
 eparture-anxiety and strives to insist that – by the power of will and i
 ntellect\, in both of which Donne knew himself strong – he still retains
  a foot on the land even after his ship’s departure\, which the poem beg
 ins by equating with death itself. Another of his valedictions\, “Of Wee
 ping\,” pleads with his weeping lover to forbear “To teach the sea wha
 t it may do too soon.”\n\nThe “Hymn to God the Father” confesses to 
 a “sin of fear\, that when I have spun / My last thread\, I shall perish
  on the shore.” In the Holy Sonnet “If Poisonous Minerals\,” in the 
 “Hymn to God\, My God\, in My Sickness” and in the “Hymn to Christ a
 t the Author’s Last Going into Germany\,” Donne strives to transforms 
 his terror of drowning into a hope of a cleansing that will prepare him fo
 r blissful immortality instead of mere annihilation. That struggle persist
 s in the direly ailing Donne’s Devotions on Emergent Occasions\, and in 
 a Whitsunday sermon\, and right up through the ambivalent emblem he chose 
 on his death-bed: Christ\, not on a cross\, but on an anchor.\n\nWhether t
 he oceans\, as they rise to erase our lands\, will hold our redemption or 
 our condemnation seems a question no less urgent that it was four centurie
 s ago.\n\nAyasha Guerin\, The University of British Columbia\n“Echolocat
 ion\, Race and Migration”\n\nThis paper begins with acknowledgement of t
 he coastal Algonquian people of Long Island\, New York\, and their changin
 g relationship to whales under colonial capitalist policies. Before the di
 scovery of petroleum in the mid 19th century\, oil extracted from the blub
 ber of sperm and right whales was used to light the lamps of North America
  and much of the Western world. For over two hundred years of coastal\, co
 lonial settlement\, New England served as epicenter of the whaling industr
 y. While many whalers were also of European descent\, this work centers th
 e lives of Black and Indigenous people and their relationships with whales
  to analyze how colonial impositions of racial differences have instigated
  new assemblages of oceanic social life.\n\nAlgonquian people on Long Isla
 nd’s waterfront provided the first muscle for the growing industry. Whal
 ing work brought Indigenous New Yorkers into relationships with European a
 nd African whalers. The number of Black whalers in the industry grew over 
 three centuries with enslaved Africans\, and by the hire of free Black fug
 itives and recruitment of African islanders from Cape Verde and other colo
 nial ports. As skilled hunters\, swimmers\, and navigators\, Indigenous an
 d Black people were disproportionately represented in New England’s earl
 y whaling ventures\, but their opportunities for advancement were compromi
 sed by the introduction of racially discriminatory laws and practices that
  trapped them into spirals of debt while whale populations were depleted. 
 By the end of the 19th century\, American whaling voyages stretched severa
 l years across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans\, their risky pursuits acce
 lerated to satiate the desires of a globalizing world hooked on oil.\n\nAn
 d whales were not passive actors — they fought back and took human casua
 lties with them. Whales are also very intelligent\; they move when heavily
  attacked in one area. Marine biologists believe that whales communicate w
 ith one another through a process of echolocation: active sonar which regi
 sters to the human ear as a variety of clicking sounds. As whaling was ind
 ustrialized\, whales responded using echolocation’s clicking codes to he
 lp them sense and register large moving targets and danger ahead\, and to 
 develop new routes of navigation. The farther the fisheries had to travel 
 from local shores to find whales to kill\, the more dangerous the journeys
  were for whalers.\n\nIn showing how intimate relations between whales and
  whalers were shaped by processes of colonization\, coastal displacement\,
  and by conditions of indebtedness\, enslavement\, and fugitivity\, I reve
 al the entangled fates of species under colonial capitalism and the value 
 of cultivating mammalian kinship for our shared survival. Demonstrating ho
 w the extractive conquests of colonial settlers shaped the exploitative tr
 eatment of whales and the movements of social groups who lived in dependen
 ce to them\, I build on Black feminists’ theoretical work and methodolog
 ies to look for interspecies\, trans-oceanic navigations of survival. I ar
 gue the importance of recognizing whales as mammalian kin\, caught in the 
 same net of colonial capitalist settlement and resource extraction as thei
 r hunters. Finally\, inspired by the metaphor of echolocation\, a method o
 f listening which helps whales to navigate oceans\, I suggest that we migh
 t listen for the socio-ecological reverberations of historic whaling diasp
 oras to learn emergent strategies of survival.\n\nBronwen Wilson\, Univers
 ity of California\, Los Angeles\n“The Sea\, the Line\, and the Limits of
  Perspective”\n\nThe subject matter\, Submersion of Pharoah in the Red S
 ea\, became an allegory of the political threat of the League of the Cambr
 ai\, when European rulers joined forces to quell Venetian expansion on the
  mainland. As noted recently\, the theme was also an expression of precari
 ous ecological conditions for the Venetian lagoon. Not only flooding but a
 lso reduced water levels required on-going management of resources. Titian
 ’s design of the biblical story for an immense woodcut (c. 1515-1520)\, 
 the focus of my talk\, is a startling rumination on divine intervention\, 
 elemental turmoil\, and human violence.\n\nShapes of water solicit involve
 ment with the sea that swells across two square meters of the composite wo
 odcut. On the left\, water engulfs human and equine bodies\, their limbs e
 ntangled\, as they are subsumed by vigorous cross-hatching. Calligraphic l
 ines are interrupted by the white of the paper where waves crest as they g
 uide us diagonally across manifold sheets toward a rocky outcrop on the ri
 ght. This rhythmic force vies for our attention with a seemingly infinite 
 vista where the sky meets the sea at the horizon\, robustly rendered in a 
 few parallel lines. The forms of the sea are echoed in the sky\, which see
 ms to fold back over\, as if a canopy\, returning us to the foreground whe
 re Moses and the Israelites gather.\n\nBy exploring the forces of the sea\
 , the woodcut contends with the limits and potential of human artifice. Th
 e sea interacts with land and stone\, unforming and re-forming its contour
 s. It overflows the limits of the printed image\, disrupting the optical o
 perations of perspective\, and playing with the corporeality of viewers. A
 ccordingly\, the Submersion raises questions about the conversion of time 
 into lines\, about the ambivalence of the horizon\, and about the limits o
 f what can be seen and known. These pictorial investigations\, and their p
 hilosophical implications\, have relevance for other examples of early mod
 ern maritime imagery.\n\nJoseph Monteyne\, The University of British Colum
 bia\n“Equivocal Space and the Problem of the Sea in Blake and Fuseli’s
  Images of Dante’s Cocytus”\n\nMy paper examines the disorienting pers
 pectives utilized by William Blake and John Henry Fuseli in their illustra
 tions of Dante and Virgil on the frozen body of water known as Cocytus\, s
 ubject matter taken from their encounter with the Italian poet’s Inferno
  in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example\, a st
 riking head engraved by William Blake around 1789\, based on a design by F
 useli\, has long been accepted as depicting one of Dante’s damned figure
 s in hell. The print features the dramatically foreshortened head of a fig
 ure who looks up and to the left with opaque\, unseeing eyes\, his mouth o
 pen\, and a tortured expression appearing on his face. Usually described a
 s one of Dante’s figures being tortured by the flames of hell\, I intend
  to challenge this assumption by positing that this head is in fact trappe
 d in the ice of Cocytus. If this is the case\, the beholder is given a vie
 wpoint from disturbingly close range\, claustrophobically positioned benea
 th this head as if their own body is stuck in the ice underneath\, in like
  manner to those individuals described by Dante as being trapped like piec
 es of straw in glass. Blake rejects any notion of distance receding into t
 he background in this print and chooses to emphasize the uncomfortable and
  oppressive physical closeness of the viewer to the figure in order to ech
 o the suppression of sight and the destabilization of figure and ground as
 sociated with Cocytus.\n\nI will argue that it is precisely this kind of v
 isual tension that is also found at the center Gilles Deleuze’s and Feli
 x Guattari’s ‘problem of the sea’. As they articulate\, prior to ‘
 striation’\, navigation of the ‘smooth’ space of the sea was achieve
 d through the wind\, noise\, colors\, and sounds of the sea\, the ‘sonor
 ous and tactile qualities’ also associated with the desert\, steppe\, an
 d ice. Striation allows the production of distant and optical space\, wher
 eas the smooth generates ‘close vision-haptic space’. As with the view
 point established by Blake’s print\, ‘one never sees from a distance i
 n a space of this kind\, nor does one see it from a distance’ (Mille Pla
 teaux\, 493). Similar tensions\, contradictions\, and inversions are found
  in Blake’s other images based on Dante’s Inferno\, particularly those
  commissioned by John Linnell for a proposed publication. In one pencil dr
 awing\, for instance\, Blake set out to map Dante’s hell in order to con
 ceptualize this large project. Mapping the circles of Dante’s Inferno in
  cross section was not unusual\, and Blake had many visual precedents to d
 raw upon. What is most striking about Blake’s map\, is that it stands in
  opposition to every other map that positions Jerusalem and the surface of
  the earth near the top of the image\, and deploys a series of concentric 
 circles that descend towards an increasingly narrow and constricted Cocytu
 s. Blake inverts this arrangement entirely and positions Satan frozen in C
 ocytus at the top of the page. In the margin of his sketch Blake writes 
 ‘This is Upside Down’\, and defends his claim by stating that in ‘In
  Equivocal Worlds Up &amp\; Down are Equivocal.’ This viewpoint will be 
 a feature of his other drawings of this icy realm.\n\n\n\nImage: Tom Killi
 on\, Tennessee Cove from Wolf Ridge\, 1977\, in Fortress Marin : An Aesthe
 tic and Historical Description of the Coastal Fortifications of Southern M
 arin County (Santa Cruz\, Quail Press\, 1977)
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CATEGORIES:Conferences
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