Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. SeaChanges re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study.

Bernhard Klein is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kent. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture.

Gesa Mackenthun is Professor in American Studies at Rostock University in Germany. In addition to numerous essays on the topics of nineteenth-century American literature, colonialism, and postcolonial studies, she is the author of Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637.