Sheroes of the Sea: A Comparative Reading of the Girl-Centred Films Moana and Whale Rider

This article considers two contemporary films in which youthful female leadership has been depicted as sea narratives. These are New Zealand director Niki Caro’s 2003 film Whale Rider, based on the 1987 short novel of the same name by Maori author Witi Ihimaera, and Disney’s 2016 animated film, Moana. There are clear similarities in the narratives and, in fact, the directors of Moana cited Caro’s Whale Rider as inspiration for their film. Both texts present the stories of young girls from Pacific Island communities and their individual and communal crises of existence and rites of passage. The classic hero’s journey merges with the iconic trope of the sea journey (both traditionally male genres) and both are presented as the personal existential quests of young girls and their subsequent transformation of the communities they eventually will lead. Both films participate in the contemporary critical pedagogical revisioning task, by providing female equivalents or parallels to previously male-dominated mythologies and narratives of heroic journeying and quest, thereby contributing to a contemporary tradition of female sheroics.

Book Reviews

Max Hirsh, Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 216 pp., 80 black-and-white illustrations, 20 color plates, $25 (paperback), $87.50 (hardback)Laura Bang Lindegaard, Congestion: Rationalising Automobility in the Face of Climate Change (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), 214 pp., $54.95 (hardback)Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb, eds., The Romance of Crossing Borders: Studying and Volunteering Abroad (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 302 pp., $90 (hardback)Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (London: Routledge, 2017), 178 pp., 19 illustrations, $149.95 (hardback), $54.95 (ebook)Christo Sims, Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno- Idealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 232 pp., $27.95 (paperback), $80 (hardback)Charlotte Mathieson, ed., Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600– Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 281 pp., 5 illustrations, €93.59 (hardback), €74.96 (ebook)Till Mostowlansky, Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 240 pp., 25 black-and-white illustrations, $26.95 (paperback)Steff en Köhn, Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 208 pp., $30 (paperback)Margaret Guroff, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 295 pp., 10 black-and-white photographs, 5 black-and-white illustrations, $17.95 (paperback)Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike Lanes Are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 210 pp., $40 (paperback)Alexander Braun, ed., Winsor McCay: The Airship Adventures of Little Nemo (Cologne: Taschen, 2017), 288 pp., $15 (hardback)

Sjøreisen, det frie hav og endeløsheten. De maritime topois teknologihistorie

Early Romanticism established and developed a series of poetical maritime common places intended to convey the pure forceful and inhuman being of Nature. “Storm at Sea”, “The Endless Ocean” and “The monstrous deep” are but three of many topological variation of “The Ocean”, gaining widespread popularity in the 19th and the 20th centuries and gradually turning into cultural clichés. This article argues that the long history of maritime narratives contains a much richer and indeed both critical and instructive legacy of topological figures than the semantically rather limited legacy of Romantic poetry. Analyzing a wide range of examples spanning from Homer to Joseph Conrad by way of François Rabelais and Daniel Defoe, this article suggests that the topologies of maritime narratives are exemplary cases of what Mikhail M. Bakhtin called chrono-topes, that is, epistemologically and politically charged configuration of literary time-spaces. The ocean-spaces of the early modern sea narratives are explicitly informed by the technological and political realities of their times, thus yielding a rich material that reflects how our ways of experiencing the oceans cannot be separated from the protocols, tools and crafts that determines our interfaces with the world.