Chapter 7 Sea, Ship, and City: Figuring the Impossible in Miéville, Hugo, and Kobayashi

In: Entangled Waterscapes in Asia
Author:
Christophe Thouny
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Chapter
Pages:
119–135
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004719170_008

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In this chapter, I discuss the modern condition of “living with shipwreck” as theorized by Hans Blumenberg through an analysis of ship heteropias in literary fiction in relation to the figure of piracy. Starting with China Miéville’s 2002 novel The Scar, I show how he draws on two writing modes, the Gothic novel and socialist realism, to engage with our present necropolitical times. I thus propose to read together Miéville’s novel with Victor Hugo’s 1866 monumental novel The Toilers of the Sea and Takiji Kobayashi’s 1929 The Crab Cannery Ship to argue that fiction writing allows heterotopias of crisis or deviation to become heterotopias of compensation able to figure the impossible and reopen a collective imaginary to is potential. The sea is figured here as both a space of communication and extraction and an immanent space of possibilities for a collective of nomadic subjects.

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Series:  African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, Volume: 1
Cover Entangled Waterscapes in Asia
E-Book ISBN:
9789004719170
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
06 Feb 2025

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