The Sounds of Cetacean Revolution Through History

Autori

Parole chiave:

whales, seventeenth-century poetry, animal revolution

Abstract

This article examines rogue whale encounters in seventeenth-century English poet Edmund Waller’s “The Battle of the Summer Isles” (1645), a poem that seeks to establish human dominion through an epic struggle between settlers attempting landfall on the Bermudian shore and a pod of sperm whales who prevent such actions. Through the poem’s use of sound, in particular the whales’ cries for justice, I find resonance with the concept of nonhuman revolutions we see actualized through the whales and orcas of today. This article traces a cultural history of whale resistance by and through sound. Part 1 recalls historical whale resistance narratives to establish prevalence for what we now term “orcanization.” I briefly show how three particular whales have disrupted narratives of cetacean kindness or friendship, choosing anti-human violence despite their capacity for kindness: White Gladis of yacht-sinking fame, the notorious Tilikum of Blackfish (2013), and Mocha Dick, the sperm whale that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Part 2 explores how Waller’s whales represent a narrative of roguish animal revolution: of whales that, in their courage, disruption, and refusal to die, muddle the Empire’s myth of New World domination. In conclusion, I assert that in the sound of orcas breaking rudders today we can hear a history of whale narratives: examples of resistance, calls for reparation, and a reminder that this world is a shared one

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Biografia autore

Taylin Nelson, Rice University

Taylin Nelson is a doctoral candidate at Rice University (under Drs. Betty Joseph & Tim Morton) working on disruptive animal encounters in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. She completed an MA at King’s College London in Eighteenth-Century Studies (under Dr. Christine Kenyon-Jones) and BA at Arizona State University (under Dr. Ron Broglio). She currently works as senior copy editor at SEL, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 and also serves as a research and data specialist for the SlaveVoyages.org’ special project “Toward a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company” (under Dr. Daniel Domingues da Silva), a project funded by the NEH and UK AHRC.  Taylin’s most recent chapter“Labouring Bodies: Work Animals and Hack Writers in Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters”—can be found in an edited collection by Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies Series (Summer 2022). Likewise, her most recent article—“Climate Disaster, Ecoanxiety, and Frankenstein: Mount Tambora and Its Aftereffects”—can be found in the Rachel Carson Center’s journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History (Summer 2024).

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Pubblicato

2024-10-30

Fascicolo

Sezione

Articles:Disruptive Encounters.Concepts of care and Contamination out of Control