Blogroll
- Critical Logistics
- Fabulous and weird website full of all sorts of info
- Geographical Imaginations
- International Transport Workers' Federation
- Middle East Report
- Object Lessons (on containers)
- Oceans Beyond Piracy
- Paleofutures – good tech stuff
- Port to port
- Progressive Geographies
- Sapping Attention
- STS Blog at Oxford
- The Funambulist
- Visual Complexity
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Archives
Category Archives: the sea
More amazing maps
The British Library Map Collection includes this amazing map: They explain the controversy around this map: … in the 1970s in Britain, suffering from the Middle East oil embargo, with economic malaise and high unemployment, it was argued as such. There … Continue reading
Posted in oil, the sea
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Become a Sea Against Imperialism
Given the centrality of the sea to the work of colonisation and empire, I love this Turkish graffito my friend Pascal photographed in Istanbul: Update: Pascal’s friend says this Deniz is Deniz Gezmiz… Good pun, in that case!
Posted in empire, imperialism & colonialism, the sea
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By the Sea
A truly beautiful book, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is full of quiet insight about leaving home, about families, about illegal immigration, and about malice. It has a brilliant humour. Here is a bit about a madrasa, a chuoni on the … Continue reading
A love story far from the sea
This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and … Continue reading
Posted in Middle East, ports, readings, seafaring, the sea, war
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Izzo, Camillieri, Montalbán
I have just finished a prize winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán detective novel with Pepe Carvalho as its central character, The South Seas. I was also a devotee of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series (who was named in honour of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán). And of course … Continue reading
Posted in ports, readings, the sea
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“A foretaste of annihilation”
Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella. A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)? A young man is given command of his first … Continue reading
“no sailor’s card”
Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words. A kind of working class Marlowe with a better … Continue reading
Posted in bureacuracy, labour, literature, ports, readings, seafaring, shipping conditions, ships, the sea
Tagged Traven
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“…for rivers and seas are not to be regarded as disjoining, but as uniting”
From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic … Continue reading
Posted in empire, imperialism & colonialism, militaries, ports, readings, seafaring, the sea, war
Tagged Carl Schmitt, Foucault, Hegel, Mahan
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The Lottery of the Sea
With thanks to Michelle Woordward whose 2007 blogpost on Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea brought me here, it seems that Adam Smith has a wonderful passage about the sea which does the familiar two discursive manoeuvres -speaking of the sea … Continue reading
The ship as the heterotopia par excellence
How wonderful is it that Foucault considers the ship the perfect heterotopia: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that … Continue reading
Posted in empire, imperialism & colonialism, political economy, seafaring, ships, the sea
Tagged Foucault, heterotopia
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The Gamming 