As we learn about blue humanities and sail through histories carried through bodies of water, we must confront the way colonization and imperialism have inherently shaped a culture of the ocean as a tool of the oppressors. While discussing language as a means to dissolve the invisible and terrestrial boundaries imbued by bureaucracy and imperialism, we delve into the history of lands discovered through ship sightings, a history of colonization spreading and arriving by ocean, and a legacy of human cruelty carried across oceans. I think about how the expansion of our language, or deterritorializing, might help us to decolonize a language and a sea of peoples so fragmented and disoriented from movement. Steve Mentz Deterritorializing Preface offers insight into how to Blue humanities, and the ungrounding of our language might help bridge the gap between “our shared cultural history.”
This complex relationship with the ocean is confronted through the Ship. In this effort to decenter the terrestrial, the ship replaces the state, which “the dissolving force of oceanic history works against nationalism, though at times it may also tend in the directions of global or even imperial totality.(xvi)” The prevailing symbolism of the ship is, to many, an agent of imperialism and capitalism. The ship offers us a way to discuss the converging politics of the world, which have disrupted, uprooted, and scattered humans and cultures throughout the globe.
While the ship offers an alternative understanding of hierarchy, community, and civilization, it also holds a fragile relationship with the shifting chaos of the sea, and the places it visits, disturbing and changing the fragile ecosystems it comes into contact with.
Deterritorialization. I like this word. Quite the tongue twister if you ask me, and God forbid if I had a stutter. I had to look up the meaning of this word, and it has several different meanings depending on who you ask, but for me, it’s simply a fancy word to describe the change in history. Steve Mentz wants us to rethink, and in return, can ignite a change in the way we view or interpret things. The world is quite literally an open ocean, and so should one’s brain.
“Thinking in terms of cyclical flows rather than linear progress makes historical narratives messier, more confusing, and less familiar. These are good things. (ixvi) Steve Mentz is inviting you to have that hard conversation or think of an unforeseen or unpopular “opinion” and bring it to life. Simply put, there are no wrong answers. He expertly uses the ocean as an example to think beyond the sea, beyond the planet, beyond what we know as life, and allows our feelings, thoughts, and emotions to “flow.” The ocean may be a scary place, but nothing is more unnerving than having these linear thoughts that keep us stagnant and allow history to repeat itself. We often try to see the world or life through a different lens, but Mentz challenges humans to create that lens.
Just like Emerson is to nature, the ocean is Mentz’s version of Emerson’s nature. We take so much from the ocean and other outward things, but it’s time for the ocean to give back to the scholar, offering new ways of thinking and imagination. It’s a scary and confusing concept to embrace, but one would be doing a disservice if they didn’t try. Drowning in one’s linear thoughts could be a slow and painful death.
In the preface to Steve Mentz’s work “Deterritorializing,” he offers several different ways to view the world (especially the Ocean) and our way of thinking. The first change he offers is current (formerly field); here Mentz talks about how we should shape our viewing on how we think in fields and areas of expertise. Instead of thinking of it as something that is stable and set in stone, we should think of it as something that is in current and always flowing. Our knowledge shouldn’t be thought of as restricted to a certain subject or area of expertise, instead we should allow our knowledge to flow like water. Mentz writes “Fields produce harvests but can lie allow. Currents flow. We need flow to know Ocean.” In his second change, Mentz writes about water (formerly ground). Here he talks about how we should be reminded that a majority of Earth’s surface is covered in water, not land. Mentz writes “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground. In an aqueous environment, nothing stays on the surface forever.” What I got from this was that nothing stays the same, much like the flow of water, things rise and sink, and so much our own knowledge of the world. Mentz’s third word is flow (formerly progress). Here we replace the idea of linear progress with the idea that things are constantly changing in flow. This of course changes and challenges our perception of all that we know, which Mentz claims is a good thing. The fourth word Mentz brings up is ship (formerly state). Here he writes, “The dissolving force of oceanic history works against nationalism, though at times it may also tend in the directions of global or even imperial totality.” Mentz is saying that unlike a majority of nations, ships are one place were unity and equality is truly real. Our politics should should no longer be focused on the ideas of state, but rather ship – “trading, fighting, hailing, sighting” as Mentz writes. In his fifth word, Mentz proposes the idea of seascape (formerly landscape). He questions whether our language is too visual, and says that underwater creatures don’t necessarily need to rely on sight as much as we do. The sixth change Mentz offers is distortion (formerly clarity). Distortion is important, it changes how we view things and how we think of things. It can allow for us to rely on ourselves and our own knowledge rather than what we see in front of us. His seventh and final word is horizon (formerly horizon). Here Mentz talks about how the horizon is a place where new things become visible. The horizon is important in life, it’ll always be there, offer new ideas and changes. Mentz’s changes on these seven words offer us a new perspective on life, our lives are parallel to water and we must be reminded of that.
Reading Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”made me realize how rarely I think about water beyond the obvious. I know the ocean as something to swim in, lakes as places to relax, and rain as an inconvenience or blessing depending on the day. But Mentz pushes me to see water as a living, shifting presence that’s woven into everything. It’s unsettling but also kind of thrilling to imagine myself as part of this system of liquid, vapor, and ice.
What really stayed with me was his turn to poetry, especially Dickinson’s “An everywhere of silver” and Whitman’s surf-soaked embrace of the sea. Dickinson captures that fragile boundary where sand tries, and fails, to hold back the water. I’ve stood on beaches watching waves erase my footprints in seconds, and her words made me feel that same vulnerability. Whitman, by contrast, dives right in, almost seduced by the water. That image of surrendering to the sea made me think of my own swims—the way the first plunge into cold water shocks my body awake, and how quickly that shock turns into exhilaration. Mentz is right: poetry often describes that complicated mix of awe and danger better than science ever could.
Still, I felt a tension in the essay. The focus on poetry and philosophy sometimes floats above the material reality of water crises today. Rising seas aren’t just metaphors—they’re swallowing coastlines, displacing families, and reshaping entire communities. I wished Mentz had pulled more of those lived human struggles into the frame alongside Dickinson and Whitman. For me, the blue humanities feels most powerful when it connects personal experience, art, and the very real politics of climate change.
Even so, I walked away from this essay with a new sense of how water refuses to stay in one form, one place, or one meaning. That fluidity—sometimes comforting, sometimes terrifying—seems like the best way to think about our current moment. If poetry can help us sit with that instability, then maybe it can also help us imagine how to endure it.
Reading Mentz’s essay on The Blue Humanities, while more extensive than the Gillis article from the week before, really helped but into perspective how vast the train of thought towards the topic can be. The gears only turned in my head after reading this specific chunk, “The reason to study the water today, as I would phrase the point now, is that we are going to be seeing more of it, closer up, in the future. Rising sea levels and high-intensity rainstorms are making our environment wetter.” Water is an ever-changing substance, and even thanks to the long lasting impacts of global warming, water is what fuels life, yet is something that can also destroy it. Water is everywhere, and just as Mentz put it, is close to us in many ways, shapes, and forms. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge what water can do for us is up to the individual, but blue humanities, as it turns out, is starting to shape the way I think about tackling Moby Dick. Sure, I can simply think about water as a simple substance that I drink or as a recreational thing to swim in or exist by, but why is the human relationship towards it so important? What drives human nature to want to “bond” with a liquid of life? Honestly, it’s human nature to want to discover the unknown. People fear what they do not understand, and even though we’ve discovered many things about the land, the sea, and the sky, I do believe the sea is still the scariest there is. It is lots of uncharted territory, but needing to strive towards the knowledge of how to approach it safely, I’m certain humans aren’t ever going to stop. It’s ego, it’s hubris, it’s passion, all in all, tackling the vast blue of the ocean through the lens of humanities rather than science seems a little more humbling. Our environments change because of water, and while science gives us the numbers, arts and words allow for a sort of empathy that’s required to even spare the blink of an eye.
When we think about nature, we often imagine balance, ecosystems in harmony, waves rising and falling with rhythm, the shore holding steady against the sea. But Steve Mentz reminds us that this vision of stability doesn’t hold up when we actually pay attention to a massive part of nature, the ocean. In A Poetics of Planetary Water, he borrows Adam Nicolson’s phrase, “strife is justice,” to describe how ecological systems thrive through tension, conflict, and constant change (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). The ocean teaches us that instability, not balance, is the true condition of life, and that lesson changes how we think about both ecology and ourselves.
We see this truth played out every day on the shoreline. The waves erase footprints as fast as they are made. Hurricanes reshape beaches in a matter of hours. The “justice” of the beach isn’t a peaceful balance, but an endless battle between land and water, constantly moving and never settled. As Mentz explains, Nicolson’s tide pools reveal a Heraclitean vision of the world: “Nothing is stable, and yet everything coheres” (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). In other words, order doesn’t emerge despite strife; it appears through it.
This idea challenges the comforting “green” ecological ideal of sustainability, where everything is in harmony. Instead, the ocean tells a harsher but more honest story. Systems survive by adapting to disruption. Coherence comes only in temporary, fragile forms, like sandbars that will one day be washed away.
That vision can be unsettling, but it’s also liberating. If strife is justice, then change isn’t failure; it’s the rule of life. The ocean doesn’t offer us peace or permanence. It offers us dynamism. To live with water is to accept instability as our ground, or better yet, our current. And maybe the most human thing we can do is learn how to float.
When I read Steve Mentz’s Ocean, the line that stuck with me the most was: “We need flow to know Ocean.” (xvi) That short sentence on page 2, to me, captures the whole spirit of the blue humanities. Flow isn’t just about water moving; it’s about how we think, how we connect, and how we let go of the old land-based metaphors that have shaped cultures for so long.
Mentz challenges us to stop thinking of “fields,” which sound fixed, solid, and agricultural, and instead to think in “currents,” which are always in motion. As we should be. That shift feels important because the ocean itself is never still. Knowledge about the ocean, and probably knowledge in general, cannot stay locked into stable and fixed categories. It has to move, to bend, to circulate around us. Flow becomes not only a method but also a mindset.
What I found powerful about this idea is that it kind of resists the comfort of any type of certainty. Fields produce neat harvests on a sort of schedule, whereas flows of the ocean can carry you into the unknown. Flow makes history “messier, more confusing, and less familiar” (Mentz xvi), and that’s a good thing. It reminds me that learning, like the sea, isn’t about arriving at a final, solid truth but more about engaging with change, turbulence, and unpredictability. That’s when we learn.
Thinking this way also changes how I picture the climate crisis. Rising seas aren’t just a threat but also a reminder of interconnection. Flow shows us that humans aren’t separate from the ocean but are caught up in its movements. To “know Ocean” is to accept that we live in fluidity, that stability is more of an illusion, and that survival might mean learning to move with the currents instead of trying to anchor ourselves against them.
Ment’s simple phrase has made me rethink how I will approach literature, history, and even my own writing. Maybe instead of looking for the solid ground in every text, I should be searching for the flow, the connections, the shifts, the messy but vital movements that carry meaning forward.
1.) What importance does Blue Humanities hold for you? How would you say this topic works along existing fields of marine science?
2.) Despite a primary focus on the ocean, are there any other bodies of water that you think humans can explore just as in depth?
3.) Why does poetry offer such a lens into planetary waters in comparison to essays or other academic leaning books?
4.) Are there any other notable authors you look towards when speaking about or studying Blue Humanities besides Melville or Gillis?
5.) If you could chose one word to describe human relationship with the ocean, what would you pick and why?