Binding: Paperback
Description: A literary and cultural history of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem a personal ornament a global commodity and a powerful political metaphor Today coral and the human - caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem a cherished personal ornament a global commodity and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale Harriet Beecher Stowe Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and George Washington Cable Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence to imagine that their society could grow like a coral reef by sustaining rather than displacing others. Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery wage labor and women's reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth - century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society it also showed them by analogy that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas's trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans and its loss is more than biological. Without it we lose some of our most complex political imaginings recognitions reckonings and longings.
Title: Coral Lives Literature Labor And The Making Of America
Author(s): Navakas Michele Currie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Barcode: 9780691240091
Pages: 240 Pages, 10 Color. 34 B/W Illus.
Publication Date: 7/11/2023
Category: History Of Science