Program: Session I
Session I
Ons. 30 september
11.00–12.30
Bryggan (Göran, 2:a våningen)
Ordförande: Otso Kortekangas
Jonas Ullerup Dejgaard (Aarhus University)
Gothic Imaginaries at the Danish West Coast
The ocean is an integral part of Danish history and a major theme in canonical literature. Despite this, Danish literary historiography has largely remained landlocked, expressing what Margaret Cohen has called “hydrophasia.” In my ongoing PhD project, I seek to address this blind spot by investigating how coastal thinking has shaped Danish literature from Romanticism until today.
In this presentation, I focus on one specific watery region of Denmark: the west coast of Jutland. With its storms, tides, dunes, barren landscapes, and dangerous fisheries, this place has fuelled the literary imagination for centuries. Through readings of works by Steen Steensen Bli-cher (1782–1848), H.C. Andersen (1805–1875), and Carit Etlar (1816–1900), I demonstrate how the west coast functions as a literary space in which humanity’s place in an unstable, oceanic world is negotiated.
I argue that these negotiations are often articulated through an ecogothic vocabulary – otherwise largely overlooked in Danish literary historiography – that foregrounds suspense, unpredictability, and non-human agency. Attending to these gothic coastal imaginaries reveals how literature has historical-ly grappled with environmental instability and the limits of human control. As contemporary experi-ences of climate change render the world increasingly oceanic and uncertain, such historical modes of thinking with the sea offer valuable perspectives. By re-centering literary works from the west coast, this paper not only uncovers previously unrecognized patterns in Danish literary history but also con-tributes historical depth and nuance to current debates about human–water relations in a changing climate.
Magne Drangeid (University of Stavanger)
Living with Cold Seas: Affect and Constraint in Cold-Water Island Literature
Research in the Blue Humanities often emphasizes oceans as spaces of movement and encounter. This paper takes a different perspective through Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Himnaríki og helvíti (Heaven and Hell, 2007/2011), focusing on persistent exposure. Set in a remote Icelandic fishing community around the turn of the twentieth century, the novel shows how cold, labour, clothing, and mutual dependence narrow the margins of life and work.
The paper forms part of a developing project on cold-water island constraint, a tentative framework for examining how persistent environmental conditions shape what people can know, feel, and do. It focuses on affect under constraint—not as muted emotion, but as feeling and action channelled by conditions that are difficult to escape.
In Heaven and Hell, the unnamed Boy and his friend Bárður work as fishermen. Before a voyage, Bárður becomes so absorbed in Milton’s Paradise Lost that he forgets his oilskin. His death from cold follows from this lapse, but also from fishing labour, bodily exposure, and collective dependence. The crew understands the danger but has little room to act differently. The episode raises questions about the limits of knowledge and attention when cold-water labour leaves almost no margin for error.
The paper then follows how Bárður’s death continues to affect the Boy after the boat reaches shore. Bárður’s book gives him a task that draws him towards the village and other people. Grief is carried through bodily exhaustion, memory, care, reading, and the collective voice of the dead. These do not resolve the loss, but they create fragile ways of continuing. Rather than describing the Boy’s survival as recovery or resilience, the paper asks how the novel holds together acute danger, lasting constraint, and partial openings towards relation and a future.
Tuuli Parviainen (University of Helsinki)
Infusing Marine Community Knowledge into Reimaging Just and Crisis Resilient Marine Futu
Cascading and interconnected socio-ecological crises, such as geopolitical tensions, pandemics, and climate crisis, drastically and rapidly reshape our society. Responding to these challenges requires the inclusion of a wide range of actors and knowledge holders in the crisis governance processes. Yet, locally relevant knowledge remains to be sufficiently integrated into such processes. This post-doctoral research project is centered around a community-based approach to understanding how socio-ecological crises impact and shape local marine environments and the multi-faceted human-marine interactions, as well as the means and capacities to cope with the changes. The empirical focus is on human activities taking place on ice (winter shipping, fishing and hunting, tourism), and on sea ice changes in the Bothnian Bay, Finland. For example, winter shipping is vital for the Finnish economy as well as the security of supply. The prevailing risks related to winter shipping (e.g. due to harsh winter conditions) are amplified due to geopolitical tensions, climate crises, as well as due to increased use of marine space due to, e.g. construction of offshore wind energy. This on-going research explores the similarities and differences in how relevant marine actors understand and perceive the impacts of socio-ecological crises and what are seen as possible future scenarios for crisis resilient and just marine communities. The methods include policy document analysis and literature review, interviews, walking workshops and participant observation, future-orientated workshops, and participatory seascape mapping.
Isabel Arce Zelada (University College Dublin)
Decolonising the Caribbean Sea: Tracing Maritime Boundaries
Through the ancestral knowledge of those Indigenous to the currents of the Caribbean Sea, the European colonisation project documented the sea in ways that tracked and surveyed the movement of people, ships and cargo. The sea was imagined as a necrotic terrain to conquer, weaponise and survey, rather than the vibrant ‘aquatic motorway’ (Hofman, et al. 2010) that it had been.
By documenting the sea, the colonising subjects could determine when someone was criminally or legally at sea. These inscriptions upon the sea, that transformed people into legal or illegal navigators constantly shifted with the will of those governing the land, appearing in the 20th century as restrictive policies that created maritime boundaries and countless interdictions in the Caribbean.
Despite the constant rewriting of the Caribbean Sea, it has also safeguarded the Taíno beliefs, the pantheon of Orishas and connected the peoples of the Caribbean despite the borders that were imposed on them. Maritime boundaries, have nonetheless, tried to break these connections by policing the Windward passage between Haiti and Cuba, “safeguarding” US territorial waters surrounding Florida, and creating an archipelago of detention centres around the Caribbean for those caught migrating through it.
This paper seeks to trace the layered Caribbean Sea through the imaginings of the people that lived in relationship to it and the ways in which those historical relationships shape the current Caribbean struggle for decolonisation.
