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Introduction Kären Wigen T o judge from movie marquees, tourist brochures, or bestseller lists, seascapes loom large in the public imagination. Yet on the mental maps of most scholars, oceans are oddly occluded. Geographically marginal to the grids of academic inquiry, the watery world seems to fall between our conceptual cracks as well. When not ignored altogether, maritime topics are routinely relegated to subfields on shipping or migration, pirates or fisheries. That ocean basins are sliced in half on our classroom maps only reinforces their academic invisibility. By contrast, the prestigious, central fields —as defined not only by cartographers but by doctoral committees, job listings , and publication categories—are overwhelmingly conceived in terrestrial terms. Yet current events have a way of challenging scholarly convention. Rediscovered as a crucial space of globalization—and one with a fragile and imperiled ecology of their own—oceans have swung insistently into view in recent years. And slowly but surely, scholarly attention has followed. Tentatively at first, in experimental forums, new networks for scholarly exchange have sprung up around maritime basins, crossing traditional boundaries of state and civilization as well as discipline. The issues raised vary from field to field, as do the methods for addressing them. Broadly speaking, historians tend to view the ocean as a highway for intercontinental exchange, highlighting transoceanic interactions and the creole cultures they have spawned. Social scientists more often approach the sea as an arena of conflict, whether for trading privileges or resource rights. And humanists prefer to probe the elusive contours of the oceanic imaginary in film and fiction, map and metaphor .¹ Despite their disparities, what all such efforts share is a shifting of the frame: an effort to move the seas from the margins to the center of academic inquiry. In their different ways, each holds up a “seascape” to scholarly view. Most such efforts to date address individual oceans, and for good reason . After all, outside the hydrological sciences, ocean-oriented research is only now evolving out of established fields that have historically been rooted 1 2 Kären Wigen on land: imperial histories, national literatures, and, latterly, feminist, labor, and postcolonial studies. Rare is the scholar who trained within the still nascent domain that might yet become maritime sociocultural studies. Rather, for the most part, individuals who originally studied one or another landed society have at some point followed their subjects out into adjacent ocean space. The result is a burgeoning but fragmented body of work, framed within individual basins: the enclosed waters of the Black or Mediterranean Sea, the wider Atlantic, the Indian Ocean hub, or the sprawling Pacific.² Yet the kinds of problems that draw scholars into maritime topics in the first place tend to resist fragmented inquiry. Since seafaring humans are caught up in truly global webs, even a colossal fragment like the Pacific Ocean is not big enough to contain most oceanic themes. In practice, the skeins of maritime connection—whether in the realm of idioms and ideas, diasporic dispersals, imperial projections, scientific linkages, or strategies of resistance—quickly transcend the confines of a single ocean. The conference at which the present volume was born was inspired by a bold but simple proposition. What if members of these emergent waterbased communities were put in conversation with each other? What would happen if ocean-oriented scholars were brought together, not around a single body of water, but across far-flung places and times? Such a venture would be, of necessity, institutionally ambitious. To canvas such a fragmented field required appeals to every Area Studies association in the United States. In addition, to underwrite an inter-area conference of this kind required unprecedented cooperation and support from the Ford Foundation, the Community College Association, the American Historical Association, and the Library of Congress. But the undertaking was ambitious—and risky—in an intellectual sense as well. Bringing people together around an open-ended theme like “seascapes” was one thing; producing significant results was another . Absent the common ground provided by communities of specialization , would meaningful scholarly conversations take place? And if they did, would those conversations resonate beyond the conference itself? The three dozen scholars who converged on the Library of Congress for a snowbound weekend in early  answered the first question with a resounding “yes.” The conferees, while biased toward history, represented a remarkable range of disciplinary, area, and institutional affiliations. Some had lived on the littoral or...

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