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

IN TERESA SHEWRY'S HOPE AT SEA, Pacific histories of environmental damage, loss, and possibility take center stage. Assembling a rich archive of poems, short stories, and novels, Shewry shows how literary texts contest (neo)colonial projects of resource extraction by imagining possibilities for different kinds of relationships with human and nonhuman others alike. In chapter 1, she reads The Bone People (1984), by the Māori writer Keri Hulme, in relation to Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon, focusing on the very different claims each makes on and about the future. Through readings of short fiction and poetry by two Asian diasporic writers from Hawai'i, Gary Pak and Cathy Song, chapter 2 attends to water's volatility and promise as a site of relation-making; while chapter 3 returns to Aotearoa New Zealand to think with poets Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi), Cilla McQueen (Pākehā), and Ian Wedde (Pākehā) as they "struggle to regenerate the connections between human and nonhuman beings across long distances" (86). Water is also crucial to chapter 4's analysis of Gould's Book of Fish, a 2001 novel by the white Australian writer Richard Flanagan whose convict protagonist is bound to fish in a relationship that is at once terminally violent and complexly life-giving. Finally, in chapter 5, Shewry confronts histories of nuclear testing as they surface in Albert Wendt's dystopian classic Black Rainbow (1992) and Robert Barclay's Melal (2002). Each of the texts in Shewry's archive, then, grapples with "the existing world and its pasts" (166) even as they insist on the openness of the future. This, for Shewry, is what makes them hopeful: in the wake of loss, hope inheres in an attunement to the world as "characterized by both damage and potential" (175).

Given the heaviness of the histories with which we are (unevenly) burdened, Shewry's definition of hope is compelling. It also feels underdeveloped. Although Shewry notes that "hope" first drew her attention as a "term … in literary works that speak about environmental loss in a rapidly changing ocean" (178), she does not consistently track how the term operates in particular texts, leaving us to wonder whether hope resides "in" literary texts, or is generated in readers as they interact with texts. What kind of "thing" is hope? Is it an affect or an orientation? A geography, an aesthetics, or a relation? Why hope and not, say, futurity, or decolonization? The lack of precision in Shewry's conception of hope makes it difficult to know whether and how hope is something we could better cultivate, disseminate, or practice against the catastrophes that variously threaten us.

More puzzling is the book's limited engagement with the genealogies and frameworks of Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, and critical ethnic studies, this despite Shewry's insistence on the importance of working with "nonfiction theoretical writings, rather than only literature, from the Pacific" (17–18). The recent work of Alice Te Punga Somerville (Once Were Pacific) and Chadwick Allen (Trans-Indigenous) might have prompted Shewry to reflect further on the nature of the bonds that hold "the Pacific" together as a space, a collectivity, and an analytic. What underwrites the juxtaposition of, for example, Hawaiian cultural production with literature from Aotearoa New Zealand? How, furthermore, does it matter that the Hawai'i-based writers Shewry treats are of Asian descent, while the New Zealand–based writers identify either as (white) Pākehā or Māori? Such positional differences, which reflect divergent experiences of empire and capitalism, receive little attention in Hope at Sea. And yet, as scholars of the black and Asian diasporas have recently been concerned to show, diasporic people's relationships with the settler-colonial state and its pacifying projects are marked by their differential racialization. Attending to such differences, or to the particularity of Indigeneity as a geopolitical identity, would allow us to better understand both what is at stake in the practices of relation-making that interest...