Navakas, Michele Currie (Author)
Princeton University Press
Publication date: 2023
Language: English
Physical Details: 232
A literary and cultural history of coral—as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Today, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others. Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.
...MoreReview Janet Browne (2024) Review of "Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America". Archives of Natural History (pp. 210-210).
Similar Citations
Thesis
Emily S. Hutcheson;
(2023)
The Living Seas: Marine Algae, Symbiosis and the Modern Conception of Coral Reefs 1880-1930
(/p/isis/citation/CBB004699922/)
Chapter
Jan Vandersmissen;
(2016)
Experiments and Evolving Frameworks of Scientific Exploration: Jean-André Peyssonnel’s Work on Coral
(/p/isis/citation/CBB275483621/)
Article
Ottmar Ette;
(2017)
Texte-île et écriture archipélique: Isle de Cube, Antilles en général d’Alexander von Humboldt
(/p/isis/citation/CBB283436335/)
Book
Endt-Jones, Marion;
(2013)
Coral: Something Rich and Strange
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001202254/)
Book
J. Malcolm Shick;
(2018)
Where Corals Lie: A Natural and Cultural History
(/p/isis/citation/CBB069251640/)
Book
Iain McCalman;
(2015)
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
(/p/isis/citation/CBB928969611/)
Article
Monson, Charles;
(2012)
Louis Agassiz and the Fossil Reefs of Iowa
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001251738/)
Book
Jeff Karnicky;
(2016)
Scarlet Experiment: Birds and Humans in America
(/p/isis/citation/CBB488937827/)
Book
Thurtle, Phillip;
(2007)
Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870--1920
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000830502/)
Book
Marco Castellari;
(2014)
Formula e metafora: figure di scienziati nelle letterature e culture contemporanee
(/p/isis/citation/CBB976488878/)
Article
Crossley, Robert;
(2008)
Mars and the Paranormal
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001031077/)
Chapter
Branch, Michael P.;
(2010)
Paths to Nature: Emerson's Early Natural History Lectures
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001035371/)
Book
Hou, Shen;
(2013)
The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001201267/)
Book
Halliday, Sam;
(2007)
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James:Thinking and Writing Electricity
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000831315/)
Article
Kelley, Shannon;
(2014)
The King's Coral Body: A Natural History of Coral and the Post-Tragic Ecology of The Tempest
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001421599/)
Article
Sanders, Mike;
(2000)
Manufacturing accident: Industrialism and the worker's body in early Victorian fiction
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000111798/)
Book
Underwood, Ted;
(2005)
The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760--1860
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000772241/)
Article
Stewart, Catherine A.;
(2013)
“Crazy for This Democracy”: Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001201816/)
Article
Clayton, Jay;
(2013)
The Ridicule of Time: Science Fiction, Bioethics, and the Posthuman
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001200682/)
Book
Peter Middleton;
(2015)
Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After
(/p/isis/citation/CBB288779393/)
Be the first to comment!