How Liquidare We? the Metaphors Defining Contemporary world systems can be thrillingly fluid. Dark pools is the mysterious term financial traders use to describe outsize transactions hidden from ordinary investors. Liquid modernity describes a post-Fordist world where the site-intensive factory machinery and fixed capital of “heavy modernity” dissolve into outsourcing, batch production, and hypermobile capital (Bauman 1-90). Arjun Appadurai defines global “flows” as forces of transglobal acculturation and communication that exceed the boundaries of localities and states: a metaphor that supersedes the core-periphery model (which imagines sharp cultural differences between haves and have-nots). Global flows invites scholars to reconceptualize far-flung geographies as multiply connected via techno-, media-, idea-, ethno-, and finance-scapes (6-7).

This Moment has Been Looming for Three Years Now, Ever since I heard the election results, and the complicated feelings that arose then are still in place. Amazement, first of all, because it's still hard to believe that a translator from SUNY Cortland could stand at this podium. Awe and humility, for sure, because I know something about my illustrious predecessors and how far I am from filling their shoes. A bit of sheer terror, too: I suspect that comes with the territory. But most of all, gratitude, immense gratitude, for the opportunity to collaborate with the extraordinary colleagues that make this huge, multifaceted association work so well. By colleagues I mean in particular the past two presidents and the two current vice presidents, with whom I've worked closely and from whom I've learned so much; the Executive Council members, all stars in their own right who know how to work productively as a team and have fun in the process; and especially our inspiring and gifted leader Rosemary G. Feal and her formidable staff. I can't name them all, but I want to thank them all, to acknowledge and applaud their integrity and intelligence, their creativity and commitment, their people skills and their many other skills that keep this big ship on course. The association is going through hard financial times, as you know, but we're in excellent hands, and I'm confident that we'll emerge from the ordeal leaner, perhaps, but stronger than ever.

Discussions of early nationalism need to focus not just on how incipient nations differentiated themselves from international communities, such as the Roman church, but also on how smaller territories fitted into more expansive composite monarchies, in which one king ruled several lands that had separate traditions and laws. Thomas Malory dramatizes the latter situation by having King Arthur's major knights come from lands subject to the English crown but located outside England: Wales, Ireland, Orkney. In their tense efforts to build a fellowship, the knights personify the troubles of building a nation that grows by hybridizing various regional identities. Malory makes Launcelot come from Gascony and dramatizes the shifts in national imagination necessary in England (and France) as Launcelot's lands shift from being autonomous to being held by the English to being part of a newly constituted France.

Recent scholarship has located John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) in the historical context of the early modern “spice race” but has not addressed the extent to which the intra‐European tensions staged in the play also enact an international contest for symbolic and cultural resources. Taking as its starting point Fletcher's acknowledged sources, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola's Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) and Louis Gédoyn de Bellan's “Histoire memorable de Dias espagnol, et de Quixaire princesse de Moluques” (1615), this essay places The Island Princess in the thick of an appropriative process that moved from Portugal's periphery to Spain, from Spain to France, and from the Continent to England. In doing so, it also traces the contours of a mercantilist logic that linked political dominance, literary hegemony, and economic supremacy—and pursued all three as mutually reinforcing national goals.

Recent comparative approaches to early American studies have described the networks of literary exchange that linked colonial writing from different imperial contexts. Current methodologies should be expanded to account for the relation between colonial writing and indigenous forms of political media. This essay compares two colonial texts, the Eendracht writings (1632—34), by a group of Dutch colonial agents, and Simplicities Defence (1646), the Puritan Samuel Gorton's appeal to Parliament. While these texts present radically different versions of New World sovereignty, both use print reproductions of indigenous political media to construct models of republican colonial order that are meant to contrast with Spanish New World regimes. The editorial practices authors employed in preparing indigenous texts for publication often embodied the political relation between imperial states and indigenous polities.

The parish and the social systems it sustains are prominent in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. His parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied throughout the nation. He combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies through the antiromance of Joseph Andrews. Romance, for Fielding, is the literary version of affectation, a transgressive masquerade that belongs to social emulation and that can be unmasked by a “test of truth,” derived from the third earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short story Lust, Caution (Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation. Lust, Caution tells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”

At the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, the Philosopher Francis Bacon Cited the Nautical Compass, Enabling Cross-Ocean travel, as one of three technologies that had changed “the whole face and state of things throughout the world,” more influential than any “empire … sect… or star” (the others were gunpowder and the printing press [118]). Bacon was not overstating the importance of saltwater transport networks in the forging of global modernity. Across an era spanning from Columbus and Vasco da Gama to the twentieth century, the maritime world was a frontier of capitalism and colonial expansion. Goods, people, and information moved across the oceans of the globe, exploiting what was called “the freedom of the seas,” even as nations warred on each other's ships for control of trade routes and coastal access. The immense wealth and power at stake in maritime transport led governments and companies to pour resources into research and development, making the maritime world one of modernity's ongoing frontiers of science and technology. It was also a great reservoir of books, narratives, and fantasy. Occurring in an environment that few could access yet that affected the lives of so many, sea voyages piqued the curiosity of stay-at-home audiences. As global ocean travel grew up together with the printing press, armchair sailors combed sea voyage literature, factual and fictional, for strange, surprising adventures as well as for information about world-altering developments and events recounted in what was called “news from the sea.”

“With You is My Life, with You My Death.” With these Words, the American Missionary Rev. William Richards Placed Himself Under the protection of the ‘aha’ ōlelo, a Hawaiian chiefly council composed of the highest-ranking ali'i in the Sandwich Islands. On the afternoon of 26 November 1827, Richards defended himself before the ‘aha against a charge of libel brought by the English consul, Richard Charlton. Charlton had argued with Richards over a letter the minister had written to his Boston-based employers, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The letter, written in October 1825, contained the news that an English captain, William Buckle, had purchased a Hawaiian woman from a chiefess. The problem was not the letter itself but the fact that it had been made public, through American newspapers. It would take the news two years to make its way back to the islands from New England, a world two oceans and six months’ sail away. The purchase of the woman, according to Charlton, was slavery and constituted a violation of British piracy law (qtd. in Richards, Letter to Evarts, 6 Dec. 1827). When Richards refused to sign an oath swearing to the veracity of his letter, Charlton accused the missionary of libel. Now both parties had come before the ‘aha ‘ōlelo to argue their cases. The question before the chiefs was whether or not the American Richards should be turned over to Charlton to face the charge in front of an English jury.

The Sea is Not a Metaphor. Figurative Language has its Place in Analyses of the Maritime World, Certainly, But Oceanic studies could be more invested in the uses, and problems, of what is literal in the face of the sea's abyss of representation. The appeal that figures of oscillation and circulation have had is easy to understand, since the sea, in William Boelhower's formulation, “leaves no traces, and has no place names, towns or dwelling places; it cannot be possessed.” Boelhower's description of the Atlantic world is representative of characterizations of the ocean in recent critical work: it is “fundamentally a space of dispersion, conjunction, distribution, contingency, heterogeneity, and of intersecting and stratified lines and images—in short, a field of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly fluid space” (92-93). The ready availability—and undeniable utility—of fluidity as an oceanic figure means that the actual sea has often been rendered immaterial in transnational work, however usefully such work formulates the ethos of transnationalism and oceanic studies alike. In this essay I advocate a practice of oceanic studies that is attentive to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world, one that draws from the epistemological structures provided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simultaneously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary, and promise. This would allow for a galvanization of the erasure, elision, and fluidity at work in the metaphorics of the sea that would better enable us to see and to study the work of oceanic literature.

Familiar Landscapes are Today Challenged by Illicit Sea Journeys. The Southern Shores of Occidental Modernity are beached by the uninvited guest, by the arrival of histories and cultures that exceed its desires and augment its fears. Like a nemesis from the sea, the interrogative presence of the migrant, who announces planetary processes that are not ours to manage and define, draws Europe and the rest of the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself. In Isaac Julien's video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007), the cruel passage of northward migration—across the inhospitable desert and perilous sea—proposes a dramatic poetics that seeks to force apart the conclusive framings of existing political, cultural, and historical narratives. Contorted black bodies gasping in the foam, abandoned on the beach in silver body bags among the sunbathers or writhing on the palace floors of European hierarchies replay the black Atlantic, memories of slavery, and racial oppression in the modern-day Mediterranean.

There is no More Sea Power. What Kind of Awe can a Fleet or an Aircraft Carrier inspire in the Nuclear Age, Whose Blasts have given a new character to military majesty and sublimity and whose marine vehicles are hidden beneath the waves? Nor do the ocean-girding voyages of global commerce offer a sense of majesty, the neat stacks of containers rising high above the decks being mere floating versions of the endless stacks at the prosaic, crane-filled ports of Busan, Long Beach, Elizabeth, or Singapore. The sea is full of transport, labor, and industry, but spectacle has moved elsewhere: what remains of the nautical in the visual media is the nostalgic sublimity of sinking ships or historical reenactments of blue-water glory. As if to underscore this vacuum of hegemonic maritime power in an age of shock and awe, the pirates of Puntland and Sulu still have their way in the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca, as they have for centuries. Latter-day posturing by the epigones of interstate maritime power contenders approaches farce, as in the struggle for the Arctic, joined by Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, and Norway, punctuated by Russian flags at the bottom of the sea and by the specter of Danish military incursion into what Canada claims as its sovereign territory (Craciun).

“There is no Sea With Which Our Age is So Imperfectly Acquainted as the Frozen Ocean,” Wrote the Eighteenth-Century Russian hydrographer Gavriil Sarychev, “and no empire which has more powerful motives and resources for extending its information, in this quarter, than Russia” (iii). Russia's Great Northern Expedition of the 1730s and later expeditions, like Sarychev's in 1785, mapped the shores of the Arctic Ocean across continental Asia, an impressive feat by any century's standards. Meanwhile, the American shores of the Arctic Ocean remained entirely unknown to the European empires (England, France, Spain) most interested in passing to and from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the Northwest and Northeast passages. Alexander MacKenzie, Samuel Hearne, and John Franklin, each traveling with native people, walked thousands of miles to reach the Frozen Ocean, leaving in their wake the occasional human disaster and an unimpeachable record of publishing successes, like MacKenzie's Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen Ocean (1801) and Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1824).

A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”

Readers of PMLA Recognize 26 Broadway, in New York City, as the Headquarters of the Mla, One of the Major Hubs of Intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in North America. But in the summer of 1840, 26 Broadway was a commercial hub that connected the world of the Atlantic Ocean with the world of the Indian Ocean. Here, in the offices of the New York firm Barclay and Livingston, Ahmad Bin Na'aman, special envoy of the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Said, offered for sale merchandise that had been brought to the United States from Muscat and Zanzibar. The merchandise included “1,300 bags of dates, 21 bales of Persian wool carpets and 100 bales of Mokha coffee” that had been acquired at Muscat and “108 prime ivory tusks, 81 cases of gum copal, … 135 bags of cloves and 1,000 dry salted hides” from Zanzibar (Eilts 32). The cargo had come to New York on 30 April 1840 aboard the Sultanah, a bark owned by the sultan and commanded by William Sleeman, an Englishman. Except for two Frenchmen whose identities are uncertain and two Englishwomen who had sought passage to London, where the ship was headed, most of those on board were African slaves belonging to the ship's officers and hired lascars, Muslim seamen from the lower Konkan and Malabar coasts of India who had been signed on in Bombay, where the ship had been refitted for the transatlantic voyage and from which it first embarked (3). The slaves, we are told, were dressed in garments made of coarse cotton cloth “called merikani, after the country of its manufacture” (4). In his account of the voyage of the Sultanah, Hermann Frederick Eilts writes of “the pungent vapors of cloves, gum copal and coffee (from the ship's cargo), of tar and pitch, of open-hearth cooking in deep, acrid sheep tail's fat, called ghee, of primitive shipboard sanitation and of coconut oil” (4). This account of the “first Arab emissary and the first Arab vessel to visit American shores” is a rich reminder of the historical interconnections in the world (6).

In 1966 Auguste Toussaint, the Mauritian Archivist, Wrote One of the First Histories of the Indian Ocean, a Topic he Described as “neglected” (1). Four decades on, circumstances have shifted, and the Indian Ocean now compels our attention. Audacious Somali pirates astound international media audiences. The new economic superpowers, India and China, exert palpable global influence. Their internecine competition plays itself out in the Indian Ocean, where the two Asian powers squabble for control of shipping lanes and oil supplies and for dominance of African markets and minerals (Vines and Oruitemeka; Broadman). Al-Qaeda continues to operate around the Indian Ocean littoral: its targets have included United States interests in Tanzania, Kenya, Comoros, Indonesia, and Yemen. United States imperialism itself persists in the Indian Ocean world, waning in Iraq but entrenched in Diego Garcia, the United States-occupied atoll from which bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq were launched.