When the Ocean Holds the Stage: Moby-Dick and Archipelagic Worlds
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Book Overview
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.
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