The Nation and What Else: Other Units of Historical Understanding

  Most of my recent work has been in thinking through the logic and articulation of oceanic histories, specifically in imagining what a region like “the Pacific” might mean. As often as I have presented work at conferences, I have noted how chairs of panels and even printed programs have inadvertently managed to say that I will be talking about “the Pacific Rim.” Indeed, it has seemed that in many narratives, oceans—and islands--are understandable only through an automatic presumption that “oceanic” necessarily must refer to the continental or littoral states that have bounded and bordered the rise of a “Pacific Century,” “Mediterranean civilization,” or “Black Atlantic.” In effect, global players are still political and economic territories in the first instance, while trade, migration, violence, religious and ideological transfer, and state and commercial interests are emanations of those units.

       What underpins these discussions is a limiting assumption: that seas are “empty:” places of transit where history takes place when launched from other places of origin. Landed territories are prejudiced toward a geopolitics built on what Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis have famously called The Myth of Continents.  Underscoring oceanic views ranges from Bernhard Klein’s and Gesa Mackenthun’s multi-perspectival Sea Changes, the Oceans Unbounded visions of Barbara Andaya—drawing on inspirations from the Hundred Horizons of Sugata Bose--to the implication of seas themselves as characters, actors, and constituents of human life in the post-colonial, environmentally astute peregrinations of Paul D’Arcy and the late, great Epeli Hau'ofa.

          The main point is not to take for absence what is in fact a construction. A first step is to understand oceans as distinctly historical realms. The Pacific, for example, has been narrated in multiple and overlapping registers: a place of currents, upwellings, and pelagic zones; interlocking canoe, pottery, and shipwreck sites studied by underwater archaeology; reconstructed Polynesian and Asian navigation and European discovery. These narratives have been coded in literatures of romance and empire, adventure, feats of transit, and enlightenment paradise, while oceans map strategic labor, maritime, military, and resource grids.

          My own provocation in this area has been to begin histories with the questions of space and place—the “where” of examining a historical subject. One possibility is to understand oceanic regions not as bounded areas—hence borders make little sense--but fluctuating spaces of alternately intense and expiring importance built around what French maritime and naval language have called points d’appui and points de relache—places of force and conjuncture. These are, of course “strategic” concepts, concerned with control of routes and passages. Yet they also locate places of provision and connection, and thus of meaning.  A web of such shifting points has a synaptic quality that is much less transnational than translocal—how a particular port connects movements of peoples, goods, and ideas to an island, or to a known fishing spot, or to communities like Indonesia’s famed orang laut—sea people living in boats and marginalized by the very nation that has become their political overlord. 

         Oceanic histories are assembled into, but do not necessarily originate from national narratives. In scholarly terms, this is reinforced by the ways that they do not fall within disciplinary boundaries: these stories develop from research that is not particularly dominated by historians, but rather by anthropologists, marine scientists, and often, scholars whose careers overlap political engagement, art and poetry, and archival study. “Oceanic” approaches are more than interdisciplinary; they are multi-genre in hydrography and biology, dance, film, song, and scholarship. As such, “History” appears under different names—kula, canoe, dance step, chant. Oral histories, genealogies, folk-tales, and embodied practices are less invented traditions than counter-memories to the state archive. Shankar Aswani’s studies of fishing communities weave together oral informant lore with aerial and underwater benthic zone mapping teams.

         Reconstructions of ancient sailing canoes and reenacted voyages understand history as active performance, part experimental method, but more, vital initiatives demonstrating continuity between ancient and contemporary knowledge and practices. Such engagements recognize oceans not as bodies that divide or distance (a terra-centric view), but as elements of a shared water column. “Shared” in this case means repudiation of distance and “isolation” and the recognition of entangled responsibilities for common heritage ocean areas. These are measured in extensity and volume as contested sites for nuclear testing, drift-net fishing, tsunami, and rising sea-level encroachments, with all of their legal complications about just where limits and boundaries can be imagined and marked.

         The profound utility of thinking through oceans is, however, not to write better oceanic histories, but to provide navigation and thinking for scholars with no apparent interest in maritime subjects whatsoever. After all, much Annales type longue durée history was derived from anthropological models of communities transposed to European peasant villages. In the oceanic register, the role of the canoe as transport, home, and symbolic universe in Oceania can question what the analogous “irreducible unit,” of analysis might this be for any number of homesteads, towns, or villages. Equally, rather than thinking of trade and immigration in terms of destinations, from proximity to distance, what if we understand ancient and seaboard societies through the very values created by exchange, as in classic debates about the seaborne Kula rings of Melanesia? “Oceanic” readings of consumerism can be seen through examples of women’s hats, luxury stories told not in Paris and London or New York, but by Sepik poachers and traders sending Papuan feathers across the Canton trade for transshipment by Arab traders to European capitals. The whole study of commodity chains—whether sugar, indigo, spice, silver, grain—can be captured here.

          Social histories underscore these. Lisa Norling’s thoughts on affective relationships mark the shifting power dynamics of families displaced by work regimes and the ways that gender constitutions have distinct and differential dynamics when comparing landed and maritime households. Such “at sea” approaches foreground discussions which are not oriented toward male nation-building as a singular narrative, but focused on the ethnological, community, economic and spiritual roles of women without men, in fluctuating temporary and permanent states.

         Absence is as much a category as presence. Oceans are, after all, famous for their tales of disappearance. These are registered in drowned wrecks, or vanishing as registered in tales of apocryphal paradise islands, or the mutineers of the Bounty. For our colleagues who work in any number of territories, such work dialogues with borderlands, questions of exile, remoteness and periphery, hinterlands, terror of extinction, yet also the search for promised places, whether religious pilgrims, utopian seekers, or rebels against empire.           Histories of climate, winds, currents, and monsoon are also all necessary categories at the centers of those peripheries, in grand imperial visions, such as Nicolás Wey Gómez’s theories on the ways the tropics meld transnational institutions with global oceanic environments—the universal church, the colonizing of the Americas, and natural histories from the shores of the Mediterranean and throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds.

         An oceanic approach then, partly determined by a valorization of vast water worlds and limited landfalls, can focus on regional and translocal communities, from fishing villages to contested regimes of mapping. Taken together, these can serve Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provincializing of continental perspectives. An oceanic perspective can be a view away from common overlays of identity based on nationalism and towards histories drawn out of space and put into places, shifting ports and pelagic zones, intersections of encounter and of intimacy. 

  Matt K Matsuda is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Memory of the Modern (1996), Empire of Love (2005), and is currently working on a study of interlocking oceanic histories in the Pacific. With Jane Kamensky, he is coordinating the program committee for the 2010 American Historical Association meeting in San Diego, California on the theme of "Oceans, Islands, and Continents." The description and call for papers can be accessed at: http://www.historians.org/annual/proposals.htm