Set in London in 1814, the story centers on political wrangling between the Crown, the East India Company, and a renegade sailor, James Delaney, who owns the title for Nootka Sound, a small island off the Pacific coast between the U.S. Taboo, the 2017 BBC television drama about trade and settlement during the British Empire, is a useful lens through which to analyze both past and present representations of the south seas. The absence of the Pacific in global discourse underlines the land-centric biases of cultural representation, which tend to relegate all maritime regions to blank spaces on the map, an emptiness only to be traversed-a gap that this essay collection endeavors to fill. Unlike the colonized spaces that border the great ocean, and which were absorbed into key financial production and consumption nodes in the flows of globalization, particularly the Americas, Australia, South-East and East Asia, Footnote 3 the speculative function of the Pacific Ocean and its islands has never given way to more embodied, realistic modes of engagement. Despite covering over 30% of the earth’s surface, generating nearly half the planet’s oxygen, and playing a crucial role in balancing the global ecosystem, the familiar terms of geopolitics such as “trans-Pacific,” “Asia-Pacific,” and “Australasia” pass over the Pacific as if it were, as Epeli Hau‘ofa jokes, “the hole in the doughnut” ( 2008, 37). Both historical and, as indicated in Attenborough’s discourse, modern representations of an invisible, unknowable south seas ignore the role of the real Pacific. The combination of partial knowledge and heightened speculation figures the Pacific almost exclusively in the realm of the imaginary, an imprecision perhaps best captured in the term “south seas.” Footnote 2 From the beginning of the modern era of globalization under colonial capitalism to today’s neoliberal era, the Pacific exists as a disembodied, virtual, speculative space rather than as a real, living, and lived-in place intimately connected with the rest of the world. At least when it comes to the ocean, the imaginary of the age of discovery is by no means over. At the same time as the voyages reveal extraordinary bounties, their narrative of awe suggests that much lies outside human knowledge, waiting, it would seem, to be found. More than their actual discoveries, both historical and contemporary seafaring feats celebrate Western exceptionalism, an adventuring spirit, and extraordinary technology that uncovers these various hidden riches for reading or viewing pleasure back home. While colonial-era seafaring first sparked the “ineluctable pursuit of an unknowable enigma,” a race for resources represented most famously in Ahab’s single-minded hunt for the great white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Footnote 1 Attenborough’s quest is to capture on film fantastic images of exotic creatures and places. “Discovered” in the context of Western European colonial exploration, speculation about the Pacific has predominantly consisted of estimations of its content and value within a Western logic of capitalist market economy. The discoveries made during the Blue Planet II expeditions, of new underwater landscapes and species, and the impact of climate change and pollution, continue a 500-year discourse of Western discovery of the world’s oceans. David Attenborough boasts on BBC’s Blue Planet II nature documentary series that the ocean is “the largest habitat on earth” ( 2017), but points out that it is also the least known.
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