Steve Mentz (in 2009)
Define reciprocity by referring to one of the readings from the term
Options: Simpson, Te Punga Somerville, Wendt, etc.
A found poem
Found poems are assemblages of borrowed text from various sources.
Something you learned about SPAM in this course
Bonnie Knows All
“The blue humanities comprises a current of scholarly and artistic discourses that foreground human relationships with water in all its forms.” (17)
Mentz
The middle passage
The slave trade (Bonus: connect to the Black Atlantic)
Could refer to any of them (but Waromi jumps out)
Describe one of the readings that approached the blue humanities through a materials lens
Ferwerda is one option: "What exactly is and can blue be?
How can we think beyond a simplistic equation of blue with water, oceans, and seas, to investigate what thinking with blue means in the blue humanities? (3)"
Something you learned about AI and the blue humanities
There are options!
“This artistic renaissance is enriching our cultures further, reinforcing our identities/ self-respect/ and pride, and taking us through a genuine decolonization; it is also acting as a unifying force in our region. In their individual journey into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania” (60).
Albert Wendt
Transpacific
•Transpacific studies tend to foreground major economic and military powers and the relationships between them, such as China, Japan, and the United States.
•Transpacific and global oceanic studies do not always consider Indigenous peoples, spaces, and intellectual practices as active and major players on the Pacific stage, even while the capitalist and imperial systems highlighted by transpacific studies exploit Indigenous bodies, labour, and resources.
•Other connected terms: Pacific Rim; Asia-Pacific
Waromi: used tidepool blenny to tell a story about UXO dumping
Te Punga Somerville: great Pacific garbage patch
Who else?
Discuss one of the poets in the course and how they helped you think about the Blue Humanities
E.g. Perez, Kercell, McDougal, Jetñil-Kijiner, Siagatonu
Where Bonnie grew up and why it matters for a course on the Blue Humanities
Kobakma
“We have already been here, thinking about oceans and how to think with them”
Alice Te Punga Somerville
Tenor and Vehicle: See Te Punga Somerville:"“All metaphors involve a tenor and vehicle. The tenor—the main focus—in this instance is the relationship between the Pacific and America, especially as that relationship is articulated and evidenced by diverse forms of Pacific presence in America. The vehicle here is the great Pacific garbage patch; I am proposing that there is something in the nature or structure of an almost unimaginable stretch of plastic debris in the North Pacific that can, or perhaps might, convey something of the relationship between the Pacific and America, especially in relation to how we think about visibility/invisibility….In the garbage patch we find things that tie the Pacific and America together: proximity, movement, disposability, invisibility, history, excess, destruction, reconfiguration, giant multimodal currents, and their life-changing effects on marine as well as human life.” (324)
Ways of approaching rhetoric in this course
Joshua Trey Barnett: "I treat rhetoric as a suite of worldmaking practices—a material-symbolic toolkit for making things matter in particular ways; for bestowing value on certain dimensions of our shared worlds; for summoning our attention to specific issues; for generating affects, feelings, and moods; for shaping what we know and believe to be true; and for rendering some responses more probable than others.
This toolkit includes an assortment of implements—some verbal, some visual, some auditory, some bodily, some ambient—all of which can be put to work in the making and unmaking of shared worlds.
… Rhetoric plays a crucial part in directing, though not determining in the strong sense, just who and what we see as worthy of our concern and our care.” (26-27)
Ojeya Cruz Banks's disciplinary approach
Dance and performance
A tangent that Bonnie went off on which is Incredibly Relevant for the Blue Humanities
So, so many options
“Water is a matrix of bonds and attachments amongst living things of all kinds, a cascade of living beings across time and space, on a cosmic scale, extending into ancient time and into the future. Wate is a set of practices that socially, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically reproduce the planet. Practices that are deeply relational and reciprocal. Practices that embody ethics privileging kindness and gentleness, creating architectures of care across time, space, and species.” (155-156)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Theory of Water
Flotsam and Jetsam
Te Punga Somerville: "flotsam, consisting of any items or parts of boats floating or washed up on land after the wreckage of a ship; and jetsam, consisting of the specific items deliberately discarded from a vessel, especially in order to lighten the load and avoid sinking."
Sharpe, King, Zong!
Name some of the disciplinary methods we've encountered in this course
Literary methods, performance, dance, musical, culinary, etc.
Bonnie's office
VZ 909
“Narrative vantage point is everything. Vacation on an island and you will have one experience. Live on an island and you will have another experience. Being from and living on an island is yet an altogether different thing. And being from an island and being diasporic is yet another thing.” (7)
Christina Gerhardt