Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature by Teresa Shewry (review)

The attention that environmental historians and critics have directed toward the effects of ecological imperialism on the land is now being turned toward the sea. Viewing the ocean as a vibrant, connective being, teeming with threatened life forms and ecosystems, Teresa Shewry in Hope at Sea engages Oceanic literary texts as both sensitive registers of ecological devastation and regenerative sites of thought and advocacy.

Hope at Sea approaches Oceania as a region where “sweeping environmental changes have reshaped life possibilities” (2) and where writers are correspondingly attuned to the relations among human lives and water cycles, watersheds, the ocean, and its inhabitants. Through countering the destructive logics that lead to pollution, climate change, overfishing, water diversion, and water shortages, the authors that Shewry selects model hopeful possibilities for thinking about ecological futures. In approaching Oceanian literatures, she limits herself primarily to writers living in anglophone settler colonies—Hawai‘i (Michael McPherson, Māhealani Dudoit, Gary Pak, Cathy Song, Robert Barclay); Aotearoa/New Zealand (Hone Tuwhare, Kerry Hulme, Cilla McQueen, Ralph Hotere, Albert Wendt, Ian Wedde); and Australia (Richard Flanagan). While Shewry marks the positionalities of these authors and notes their connections to social movements, settler colonialism itself is largely bracketed as the contentious sociopolitical setting out of which most of the texts she discusses have emerged. To the degree that native-settler relations are discussed, it is in terms of their alliances and the shared senses found in environmental writing of “threatened, appreciated reality” (57).

Shewry reads her “archive” in ways meant to evoke hope as a critical analytic and mode of engagement, sparked by “damage and struggle” (6). The environmental hope expressed in and through literary texts realizes itself actively both against its opposites (fatalistic or escapist ecological views) and against vulnerable aspects of its own conceptual structure (false, imperialistic, vague, flawed, unrealistic, individualistic, and outright destructive forms of hope). Formed “in the Shadow of Sorrow” (as the introduction is titled), such hope is uncertain about prevailing and uncertain about what prevailing might look like, given a commitment to open futures. Along the lines of Jonathan Lear, Vincent Crapanzano, and, significantly for the region, James Clifford on “Hau‘ofa’s Hope” (Oceania 79 [3]: 238–249), Shewry appreciates how hope takes shape within different traditions, in ways that require that it not be something assumed that can then be applied but that it aim over its own horizon or present perceived limitations. Culture-based thought systems are in turn unsettled to the degree that an inbuilt speciesism reduces the agencies of nonhuman beings.

In contrast to colonial visions of island utopias, which imposed violent transformations on both the natural and human world (in part by not recognizing the two as connected), Shewry posits openings for hope at the interface of human-nonhuman relations. She recurrently moves from blue postcolonialism (contrapuntal readings of the colonial archive) toward a bioethical commitment to consubstantial living with nonhuman marine beings. Against colonial developmentalism, whose aggressive linearity threatens the ability of “being, as well as its potentials, to exist across time,” Shewry’s chapter 1, “Endurance, Ecology, Empire,” reads Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) as committed to a “language of endurance and survival that animates” the physical world and to characters who “attempt to secure viable forms of environmental life” (23, 50).

Chapter 2, “In Search of Rain: Water, Hope, and the Everyday,” furthers the concern with water itself and aspects of its being, emphasizing “hydrosocial relations.” Juxtaposing Pak’s short story “Language of the Geckos” (2005), which celebrates the return of water to a community from which it had been diverted, and Song’s poems about plantation life from Picture Bride (1983), in which water figures as “an element ideally capable of kinship . . . able to wrap around and pass between people’s bodies” (75), Shewry suggests how living deliberately with water...