Sea Power

• Published in: PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
• Main Author: Connery, Christopher
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Modern Language Association (MLA) 2010
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Long Beach; Norway
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.685; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0030812900142129

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).