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

It might seem strange to connect the word hope with the world's oceans. No honest person can deny that the oceans face multiple crises: overfishing, dying coral reefs, acidification, industrial and agricultural pollution, vast rafts of garbage. The oceans bear witness to humanity's worst tendencies. It is therefore a bold effort that seeks to find hope in this litany of despair.

In Hope at Sea Teresa Shewry seeks signs of hope in various literary works from around the Pacific region. This book has many attractions. For the nonspecialist Shewry provides a useful introduction to the environmental/cultural discourse of a region that is often forgotten. She provides a good overview of recent literature dealing with the environmental crises and the social and political crises that have evolved in the region and places this literature in the broader context of global capitalism and colonialism.

Shewry gives a close reading of a number of novels, poems, and stories set in the Pacific. In particular she reads Keri Hulme's The Bone People (1986), Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow (1992), Robert Barclay's Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (2002), Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), Cathy Song's collection of poems Picture Bride (1983), and Gary Pak's short story "Language of the Geckos" (2005). Each of these works involves people facing an environmentally damaged world, lost cultural practices, and globalized oppression. Of particular interest to utopian scholars is Shewry's use of Wendt's Black Rainbow to show the conflict between a "completed utopia" that seeks to control the natural world and the "original people" who live at the margins of society. The reflection on modern New Zealand and other settler states could not be clearer.

What does hope mean—what can it mean in the context of environmental and cultural degradation? At the start of the book Shewry states that "in political discourses, the term hope is sometimes invoked to offer a vaguely promising and easily deferrable future without commitments to actual change" (3). She believes that literature can provide a different and potentially better kind of hope, less rigid and programmatic, more open to diverse possibilities. Imagined but possible worlds are created in literary works "not as blueprints, but to clear space for a relationship with the present world and future that includes possibility and experimentation" (9). Shewry further states that "hope is a mode of engagement that turns us toward the creativity and struggles that exist in the world and the environments that they might yet enable" (25). Hope provides "an awareness of the openness and promise of the future, in which thoughts, feelings, and practices are connected" (178). Unfortunately, considering hope in this way makes defining it or identifying it in the works she critiques somewhat unfocused. Perhaps the ambiguous and unclear nature of the meaning of hope in these times is reflected in the author's repeated use of phrases such as "might be" and "could be." The idea of hope remains elusive throughout the book. Hope seems to be more a stance, a position, than the motivator of action. Perhaps hope can best be understood as facing the multiple and overlapping crises of the existing world with honesty, freed from the illusions of utopianism.

Shewry repeatedly contrasts More's Utopia and its control over nature and its neighboring peoples with contemporary Pacific region literary efforts that focus on living in connected and equitable relationships with our fellow humans as well as with animals and nature. She also draws on Butler's Erehwon and Bacon's New Atlantis as well. Butler's work is used to exemplify the European interaction with new lands and indigenous peoples. That interaction is one defined by control and destruction. Bacon's book shows the Western desire to control nature by bending and twisting it to fit the needs of industry and capital without...