This project focuses on the scholarship of what is coming to be called “the blue humanities” concerned with oceanic ecology and local-regional-global cultural ties to oceans. His work is also concerned with articulating the oceanic ties of Taiwan, Korea, Okinawa, Hong Kong and the Pacific Islands to Pacific modes of environmental belonging and interconnection that goes beyond nation-state territorial formations in emergent ways.
Pacific Beneath the Pavements: Towards a Blue Poetics of Oceanic Becoming will contribute to theorizing of a “blue poetics” and “blue humanities” by elaborating the occluded, suppressed, or displaced connections of the Pacific Rim cities to the oceans they draw their material well being and even cultural distinctiveness from. I move from the ties of Paris ’68 and Berlin 1989 to the Pacific Ocean (as expressed in the slogans, Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the paving stones, the beach!) and “Visafrei bis nach Hawaii”–“Visa free travel, all the way to Hawaii” to elaborate how the Pacific functions as an imaginary site of utopic longing and libidinal release. All the more so, this study moves to expose how the planetary crisis the Pacific Ocean now faces—meaning the ecological catastrophe of disappearing coral reefs and native islands being submerged, oceanic acidification, thermal shifts, amid the mounting North Pacific garbage gyres of transnational detritus between Japan and the USA—needs to be exposed and interconnected, which I invoke via the framework of “Oceania” and oceanic cities. The Pacific becomes a site of peril and promise at once resonant of threats and damages but also full of emergent formations, literary and social, that build upon translocal, trans-Pacific, and transnational ties to the ocean.