Introduction: Maritime Im/Mobilities

Abstract

AbstractIn a time of refugee boats and rising seas, maritime mobilities and immobilities have regained critical status for the development of viable futures—social, economic, environmental, political, as well as imaginative. This introduction describes advances in maritime studies, alongside “blue cultural studies” or “oceanic humanities,” and covers a selection of recent critical perspectives in the maritime humanities that have extended, but also criticized, earlier assumptions in the field: Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and class-, race-, and gender-based. The focus is on some of the ways in which maritime studies has been informed by mobility studies, an interdisciplinary field within the humanities. Taking up cultural geography’s revision of the field to acknowledge the centrality of movement in history and society and to move beyond logistics-centered transportation studies, mobility studies investigates the production of mobilities and immobilities historically, socially, politically, and culturally. The present volume sets out to explore how oceanic im/mobilities have been framed and articulated in the literary and cultural imagination.