Symposium Agenda - The University of Sydney

THE SEA – EPISODES & IMAGININGS
SPEAKER ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
IN PRESENTATION ORDER
Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea
Adventures at sea have inspired wildly popular modern novels from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to the
works of Patrick O'Brien. This talk will survey masterpieces of sea adventure fiction across its history, and
explain how writer like Defoe, Melville and Conrad were stimulated by writings from the global age of sail
describing exploration and work at sea. Returning to texts by world-famous navigators like William Dampier
and James Cook, I suggest that mariners, like their fictional avatars, have historically been icons of a kind of
practical intelligence eludes easy explanation. This faculty includes discipline, dexterity, patience, tradition,
opportunity seized and impassible dangers overcome. Sea adventure novelists celebrated the mariner's practical
intelligence and created a literary expression of it in adventure fiction. From the poetics of the sea novel, we
inherit our best detective novels, spy and science fictions.
Margaret Cohen holds the Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French Language, Literature and
Civilization, and teaches in the department of Comparative Literature and Stanford University. Over
the past ten years, her research has rethought the literature and culture of modernity from the
vantage point of the oceans. Her most recent book is The Novel and the Sea (UP Princeton, 2010),
which received awards from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the International
Society for the Study of Narrative, and the American Comparative Literature Association. Her
previous publications include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist
Revolution, the prize-winning The Sentimental Education of the Novel, and a critical edition for W.W.
Norton of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Her newest research examines the impact on
literature and the arts of underwater technologies from the invention of aquariums and helmet-diving
in the middle of the nineteenth century until the present day.
PANEL: Cultures of the Sea
Leah Lui- Chivizhe, Voice and Object: Torres Strait turtle shell masks.
Europeans first sighted turtle shell masks of the Torres Strait in 1606, on the island of Zegey. But it wasn‟t until
the mid to late 19th century, when commerce and then Christianity became entrenched in the region, that many
of the masks were traded or taken. The materials are now held in museums around the world. Ethnographic and
museum documentation indicate their use in funeral and initiation ceremonies, for celebrating good harvests or
to induce crop fertility, as appeals for productive hunting expeditions and also to celebrate marriage. While
these practices continued for Islanders, they did so in the absence of the turtle shell materials.
As museums opened their doors to the descendants of source communities, Islanders' interest and engagement
with the materials have steadily increased. Given the period the masks have been separated from cultural
practice, questions arise about whether they can mean anything more to Islanders now, than they do to
exhibition goers who have no cultural association with them. An important aim of my research on these masks is
to unpack their meaning to Islanders today and my presentation will give an overview of the human, animal and
environmental network that informed their manufacture and inspires contemporary Islander engagements.
Leah is a doctoral student in history at the University of Sydney where her research focuses on
Torres Strait Islander relationships and engagements with the marine environment and the Islanderturtle
relationship. Leah also holds graduate qualifications in material anthropology and human
geography. She has undertaken research on material culture and eastern Torres Strait tombstone
ceremonies, Islander identity in Sydney and the history of Islanders in the northern Australia
railways. From 2001-2012 she taught Indigenous Australian Studies at the University of Sydney and
now works part-time for the Nura Gili Centre for Indigenous Programs at the University of New
South Wales.
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