Session Abstract

For much of human history, oceanic space provided the primary linkage between far-flung peoples. However, histories of the mobile mariner have often emphasized the distinct identity of sailors as “men apart” and treated their networks as circumscribed and distinct from those of the shoreside community. This panel resists the tendency to construct sailors as archetypal outsiders.  Our aim is to reconnect ship and shore.  We propose that historians can use maritime experience (including its varied representations in different media) as the basis for a transnational history encompassing not only seafaring males but all those implicated, invested, or entangled in the globe-girdling networks set in motion by oceanic voyaging.  The study of “maritime community,” in this more inclusive sense, offers many opportunities for innovative reappraisals—and even redefinitions—of familiar topics such as foreign policy, labor history, imperialism, and citizenship law.  Laura Tabili’s We Ask for British Justice suggests some of the fruitful possibilities here, but such approaches have not yet been widely applied.

The three papers on this panel show how an oceanic frame of analysis can enrich our study of gender, race, class, and national identity.  The papers share a common focus on performance, considering in turn public grieving, line-crossing ceremonies, and blackface minstrelsy, and examining how each both determined and unsettled the boundaries of their respective communities.

Annaliese Bateman’s paper examines public and private memorials surrounding an ill-fated British expedition into the Arctic.  For women, expressing grief and concern was both a feminine duty, and a challenge to gender norms; petitions and letters had to reshape government policy while avoiding the appearance of making any outright demands.  Through this delicate gender performance, a response to the peril of distant men reshaped domestic culture.

David Dennis, in his investigation of events aboard a German merchant vessel in 1913, similarly undermines any facile distinctions between home and abroad.  An age-old equator-crossing rite of passage descended into sexual violence, provoking debate in the courts, the press, and in parliament over German manhood.  The Wilhelmine empire was anxious to project itself abroad, yet unsure about the character of those who sailed under the German flag.

Brian Rouleau’s paper also finds ambivalent attitudes among nineteenth-century American citizens dependent upon seafarers as their republic’s principal presence overseas.  His paper describes the role of maritime networks in disseminating racial caricatures across the globe as white mariners “blacked up” and performed minstrel shows for indigenous audiences throughout the world.  New York, Philadelphia, and other centers of minstrel “creativity” were, not coincidentally, also some of the nation’s largest seaports.

This panel, then, examines the consequences of the mobility made possible by oceanic space without simply celebrating the possibilities of unfettered travel.  Stasis is part of the picture as well; many fine gradations of mobility, always in the context of power structures such as gender and race, multiplied competing and destabilizing assertions of community and claims to belonging.