March 28, 2025 • 39 mins
There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations, coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination. In rethinking the limitations of Coral, Jue opens up possibilities for a more expansive sense of environmental media, more inclusive goals for multispecies justice, and more nuanced forms of oceanic care work. Here, Jue is joined in conversation with Ann Elias.
Melody Jue is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jue is author of Coralations and Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater and coeditor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz.
Ann Elias is professor emerita of visual culture at the University of Sydney. Elias is author of many books including Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity.
REFERENCES:
Coral Whisperers (Irus Braverman)
Situated Knowledges (Donna Haraway, in the journal Feminist Studies)
Her Seal Skin Coat (Lauren Beukes, short story)
Sylvia Earle
Jacques Cousteau
California Against the Sea (Rosanna Xia)
Jean Painlevé
Zoological Surrealism (James Leo Cahill)
Alien Ocean (Stefan Helmreich)
Chasing Coral documentary
Coralations by Melody Jue is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Melody Jue (00:05):
In many places that drilling had been attempted,
there were these large reefs ofI came across a reference that
said like this one reef ofLophelia Pertusa, we named it
after an oil pipeline.
Ann Elias (00:17):
What are the implications of correlating
corals with the tropics? What'sbeen marginalized? What's been
overlooked in that process?
Melody Jue (00:30):
Hi. My name is Melody Jue. I'm associate
professor of English at UC SantaBarbara. I'm a scholar in the
ocean humanities and the authorof Wild Blue Media, Thinking
Through Seawater, as well as theco editor with Rafiko Vries of
Saturation and ElementalPolitics. I'll briefly introduce
how correlations got started.
This began with an invitation todevelop a three day short
(00:54):
lecture course for a graduateseminar at, summer school in
Bologna in collaboration withDuke University. And I was
racking my mind for what scaleof material I had that would
suit three days. And I noticedthat a number of books had been
accumulating on my bookshelfaround the topic of coral, coral
empire being one of these, byAna Elias. As I sat with the
(01:17):
material, I began to think abouthow media and mediation emerged
in each of these texts, as wellas what the texts didn't
address, which were the weirdcorals, so soft corals, deep
water corals, any corals outsidethe sphere of the tropics or
outside the materiality of thestony. And this led me to think
about the significance of nonnormative corals in certain ways
(01:40):
and became the chapters thatturned into the book
correlations.
The title could have beenuncorrelating or uncorrelated,
but correlations seem simpleenough to to stick with and
echoes other iterations by IrisBraverman, Nicholas Mangan, and
others who've also beenattracted to playing with the
(02:01):
pun of choral and relation orchoral and correlation. I'll
leave it there and welcomequestions from Analyas today.
Ann Elias (02:10):
Thank you Melody and it's so good to meet you here
today. It's lovely. I'mProfessor Emeritus of Visual
Culture at the University ofSydney. I've lived half my life
in Auckland, New Zealand but mylife as an academic has been in
Sydney, Australia. I'vepublished books on camouflage in
(02:31):
art, war, and nature, on flowersin natural history and art, and
on the underwater aesthetics oftropical seas.
My last book, Coral Empire,which you mentioned, Melody, was
published in 2019, and itdiscusses the adventures of
early photographers in tropicalwaters at The Bahamas and also
(02:52):
the Australian Great BarrierReef. My more recent work
investigates early theories ofunderwater optics and subaquatic
animals, including fish andscallops. Looking particularly
at an English naturalist,Francis Ward, I'm always first
and foremost interested invisualizations of the
(03:13):
underwater, and this takes meinto areas of illustration,
photography and filmmaking, andsometimes painting. I'm
completing a new book on thecultural history of the
underwater regions of SydneyHarbour, and it continues an
inquiry into human entanglementswith oceans. And here, I think,
(03:34):
is the crossover with Melody'sresearch.
So, Melody, you do suchinteresting work on oceans, and
thank you for referring to mybook Coral Empire in your book
Correlations.
Melody Jue (03:47):
It was such a huge influence. I found it so useful
to build on your insights aboutthe optical medium of seawater
and the way it was extending,the lens of the camera through
its clarity in the in thesituation of the tropics. And
that really helped me thinkthrough what was going on
differently in, spaces wherecoral couldn't be sensed in that
(04:07):
same way, such as in the deepocean where a lot of acoustics
were used to sense corals andwhere they were, instead.
There's just so much, I think,to imagine then with that that
one insight about the extensionof the lens through seawater,
such as what other what otherextensions are there in the
ocean or through the sensorycapacities of sea creatures. So
(04:28):
I really tuned into when yousaid scallops, which, you know,
where, where you're taking, thevisuality of the scallop, which
has those lovely, almost bluepearl like eyes that are light
sensitive.
Ann Elias (04:41):
One of the interesting things I found about
scallops, and and and I came atthem through an image. I learned
that a scallop has up to 200eyes across the mantle of its
shells, and that intrigued me tostart with. And then I learned
that Henri Bergson wasinterested in scallops and how
he developed his philosophy ofthe convergence of human and
(05:04):
mollusk evolution from thescallop. It all corresponded
with some research I was doingon a marine scientist,
Australian, William Dakin. So itall kind of tied in.
So I'm not surprised you'reinterested in that particular
mollusk. But I really feel likethere are some synergies between
(05:25):
correlations, as you say, andcoral empire that do relate to
that mediation of a very cleartropical sea that photographers
figured drew them because therewas some correspondence between
the idea of developing aphotograph and the idea of the
(05:45):
coral organism developing too inthese warm waters. So I thought
that was great. But also I thinkthere are some synergies with my
new book, The Under Harbour. AndI think the two areas I would
pick up on here are diving andcorals.
I wondered if we could startwith your previous work, Wild
Blue Media, and the subject ofdiving. My last two books, Coral
(06:07):
Empire, the one I'm writing nowon the Under Harbor, foreground
the practice of diving, that islike diving suits and
submersibles and how they openedup the undersea to art, science,
and popular culture at the turnof the twentieth century, and
kind of revealed it as awondrous but also frightening
environment, and an environmentreadily exploitable for industry
(06:30):
and profit. So for me, diving isa discursive inquiry. I I use a
wide range of historical sourcesfrom newspapers to diaries. But
for you, it's an embodied andeffective inquiry.
You submerge to think in andthrough seawater, as you put it.
(06:51):
And Wild Blue Media is a milieuspecific analysis of the sea
written as a scuba diver andacademic, which I love. And you
talk about thinking about whatit means to immerse in the ocean
and to quote you, the conditionsof perception. So I'm really
keen to hear more about thethings that scuba diving has
(07:13):
taught you as a humanitiesscholar, either about knowledge
or a philosophy of care or asyou put it, acculturated habits
of thinking. And whether you arecontinuing to learn about oceans
and culture with your successivedives.
Melody Jue (07:29):
That was such a lovely framing, and I'm so happy
to talk about diving. As I'verevisited the work in Wild Blue
Media, I started thinking moreabout the quality interpretation
or the way that diving affordscertain possibilities of
underwater interpretation andwhat that could mean. That has
everything to do withdifferences in the visuality of
(07:50):
the world underwater and whetheror not you bring a flashlight
and also how your own movementand being moved by the ocean
affects the possibilities ofinterpretation for a given site.
So access is constrained orenabled by how the ocean itself
is moving. In correlations, Iactually talk about a different
(08:13):
iteration of this by brieflyreflecting on some diving I was
doing in Fiji in 2020, just justbefore the pandemic.
And there's this one drift dive,which is where the boat drops
you off on one end of thecurrent and you drift, you
descend and then drift along awall, and then the boat will
pick you up at another location.So sometimes these dives take a
(08:34):
bit of coordination because ofhow you need to be mindful of
where the where the pickup pointis so you don't get carried off.
On this one wall, there were anumber of, purple soft corals.
There was a couple times wherewe were drifting along and I
wanted to pause to look at thecoral, but the current was so
strong that I couldn't do thisin the same way. So, the
(08:56):
possibility of even taking aphotograph was made difficult by
the conditions of even observingthe corals in the first place.
And yet that current was soimportant for the purple soft
corals themselves, which wouldbloom, or inflate and feed on
the particles of water driftingby when the current was active.
(09:17):
And so the strength of thecurrent had everything to do
with the timing of when thesepurple soft corals were
blooming. So being able to seethem in that state was also the
same condition of possibilitythat delimited stain put to to,
to see and to observe what theylooked like a little closer, not
(09:37):
wanting to touch them,obviously, but wanting to come a
little bit closer to the wall.Given my background in science
and technology studies andthinking a whole lot about Donna
Haraway's situated knowledges,you know, I got to the point
where I was began to care aboutwhat the conditions of
possibility for visiting, seen,interpreting underwater places
really were. Now, one thingthat's changed in my life since
(09:59):
writing Wild Blue Media, where Iwas thinking a lot about
normative habits of embodimentas a new diver and getting used
to what other scuba diversconsider to be normative habits,
like making sure you'restreamlined, horizontal, tucking
in all your your, regulator andthe other hoses hanging off you
so that they didn't hitanything, that sort of thing.
I have a 1.5 year old daughterand this has presented
(10:22):
conditions where I haven't beenable to get in the water for
almost three years now. So I wasthinking that this is a bit like
a voluntary selkie storycondition, the selkie story
being part of this northernEuropean mythology where these
seal women would emerge onlands, put their skins aside. It
was, you know, thefted by someman who was holding it, and then
(10:45):
they were compelled to be athome. My version of that is not
not quite so patriarchal. Thisis all voluntary, but I think a
lot about how my scuba tank hasbecome a doorstop recently and
how my wet suit has also beensitting on the hangar.
And these are things to which Iwill return, I know one day
soon. But the selfie story keepsreturning to me because of
Lauren Buke's, amazing shortstory, Her Seal Skin Coat, which
(11:09):
imagines the vicariousexperience of of being with a
seal through this futuristictechnology called a seal skin
that would allow you to go intoa sensory immersion tank and re,
experience the transmittedsensory experiences of a wettle
seal as it was coursing throughthe Antarctic. So more recently
I have not been in the water butI'm thinking about it.
Ann Elias (11:32):
Yeah, for sure because certainly having a child
does change life but you alsoturn that into a kind of
philosophical question, which istypical of your kind of
thinking. But I was reallyinterested in how you were
talking there about noticing themore than human as a diver and
how the ocean moves and movingwith the ocean and going with
(11:56):
the flow, you know, noticing thepurple soft corals and enjoying
the strong currents. And I'lltell you why that interests me.
I've been looking at diving froman earlier era, and that is the
turn of the twentieth century.And the kinds of divers who
speak about their experiences asdivers were often industrial and
(12:19):
professional hard hat divers,trades people that worked
underwater.
Their pre Anthropocene, if youlike, perspective on the
undersea was that it was a placeto battle, a place to have a
fight, a fight with the tides,to go against the flow, and I
(12:39):
guess this is your point, thatyou're involved with the
politics of noticing, and ecopolitics that the early
twentieth century didn't share.There was really no ethics of
care that you talk about in 1900among the kinds of divers that
I've been researching, theycertainly didn't nurture that
kind of ecological care for theunderwater. You talk about
(13:03):
diving engendering a distinctkind of subject position, I'm
just quoting you here, involvingtemporary alienation from the
land that perhaps provides thepreconditions of an ethics of
care. I think that's a lovelyquote. In fact, I've put it in
my new book.
But the divers who I've beenresearching, Melody, and who
worked underwater in the Port OfSydney Harbor saw themselves in
(13:27):
combat with the tides and rocksand mud, and their engagement
with the underwater was sensory,but it didn't lead to feelings
of connectedness ratheropposition. Since then, of
course, we've had climate changeand you are a product in a
sense, not a product, that's abad word, but you are a
philosophical emergence of somuch political discussion about
(13:52):
the need for an ethics of carethat is contemporary. But you do
have this really interestingcontext which is those early
divers. And I was thinking maybethe scientific divers. Are you
interested in people likeWilliam Beebe?
Oh, Cousteau, obviously. SylviaEarle?
Melody Jue (14:09):
Yeah. Sylvia Earle, I think, has care to start with.
And, you know, maybe, Cousteauis a good sort of hinge figure
between the military attitudethat I'm going to sort of war
against the sea or win againstthis fish I'm trying to spear or
embody some kind ofconfrontational struggle as
opposed to sort of swimming withbecause Cousteau has that whole
(14:32):
change where he he becomesenvironmentalist after he sees
more about how the oceans arechanging compared to his first
documentary, The Silent World,that contemporary
environmentalists would see andgo, like, you use dynamite to
blow up underwater and thenbring all these fish to the
surface. He makes a change fromthat. His book, The Silent
World, I found so useful forthinking about the phenomenology
(14:55):
of diving because it was therethat he was really reflecting on
a lot of the more pleasurablesensory qualities of swimming
underwater.
But at the time, like, those twowere co present for him. I want
to go back to maybe somethingyou said too about these
confrontational attitudestowards the ocean that are
undergirded by a lot of militaryfigurative language or
(15:16):
metaphors. And I just, taughtthis book California Against the
Sea, which is by the LA Times,journalist Rosanna Shah. And
that against in the title endedup being so important for some
of the, detrimental attitudestowards sea level rise
adaptation she was talkingabout. Like a lot of people
(15:38):
don't know that sea seawalls,erecting these seawalls always
causes erosion later down thebeach.
So to make one and protect oneproperty implies erosion later.
And, of course, these arefavored by entities in The
United States where I'm based bythe Army Corps of Engineers. And
through interviews, Xia talksabout how no one likes the words
(15:59):
managed retreat because itimplies losing somehow. So she
and others have given a lot ofthought to what a more
efficacious rhetoric is fordescribing relation between
communities and sea level risethat doesn't draw on the
language of militaryinvigorations, like war, combat,
or even the prepositions likeagainst. I also wanted to
(16:22):
mention one other thoughtregarding the divers and how
they think of themselves.
I think for for your new work,that seems like such a
productive question just topause and understand that, you
know, not all divers over timeand also by community have
thought of themselves in in thesame way. So in Santa Barbara,
there's a whole diving communityI have not communicated with
(16:42):
that, trains in industrialdiving. And I imagine, you know,
would have a different relationto their time underwater. But
something I've observed withrecreational divers, many people
pride themselves on the abilityto use their air tank well. So
this means maximizing theirbottom time, not exerting
(17:04):
themselves so much throughchasing something, through doing
the kind of, hard swimming thatwould raise your heartbeat a
lot.
They see the mark of anaccomplished diver as maximizing
your air. And to do that, youactually really have to relax a
whole lot. The more you canrelax and, just sip your air as
opposed to guzzle your air, thelonger you can spend underwater.
(17:29):
And there's, one who's like, ohyeah, I used to hang out and at
90 feet with my friend for likethe whole time and everyone else
had already gone up and theirtechnique was just sipping on
the air and, achieving this,this state of very meditative
relaxation. And I can't think ofanything that is so, you know,
different from the kind oftension or, wall like rigidity
(17:54):
of a military attitude.
Ann Elias (17:57):
Yeah. For sure. I mean, that idea of meditation
and relaxation certainly didn'tcome into the divers who I'm
thinking about who use dynamiteto remove rocks and
obstructions. They they dredgedthe sand. They reshaped the
shoreline.
They built the seawalls, all thethings that you mentioned
before. One of the questions oneof the crossovers I think that's
(18:20):
interesting for me with yourwork is that well, first of all,
I became interested the underseathrough surrealism and the
influence of surrealism as anart movement, where artists took
interest in the undersea to findunsettling images that were
alien to everyday rationalexperience. And they wanted to
(18:42):
encourage others audiences toimagine the world differently
through the undersea as a fluidshape shifting realm like a
dream. But you're interested inthe idea of the alien ocean
through the perspective ofscience fiction, and I thought
you could just talk about thatfor a few minutes if you don't
(19:03):
mind.
Melody Jue (19:04):
You know, I actually have a surrealism connection
too, and it's the documentariesof Jean Paul Levet. When I was
in graduate school, they hadbeen recently, released by
Criterion Collection. There's abook in a booklet that went with
this by the title Science isFiction, which is sort of a fun
inversion on science fiction,but science as fiction, which is
a little bit delivered with awink and a nod perhaps.
(19:27):
Palmolive, who James Leo Cahillhas, written about much, much
more extensively in hisexcellent book on Palmolive.
Palmolive was trained as ascientist, but was also going to
the cinema in Paris in the 20sand 30s, very regularly, and had
this interest in sea creatures.
And so even though Wild Bloomidadoesn't have a chapter on him,
(19:49):
as I was developing the book,like, was thinking about Pompeo,
quite a bit, including aboutincluding connections that are
well known in between scienceand surrealism, like the
automaticity of the camera andautomatic writing or sort of
this automatic viewing and thefantastical shapes of the sea
creatures. And, the one aboutthe seahorse, that Pon Levet
(20:15):
filmed also had some interestingconnections with sort of the,
musing on the upright posture ofthe seahorse and like, oh, maybe
we identify with the seahorse alittle bit more because we too
are vertical beings that have anupright posture. And I'm not
quoting him directly there, butthere is there is something on
the on the verticality. And so,so his profiles on sea creatures
(20:39):
and invitation to take thescience seriously, but also
think about how it's assembled,how it's ordered, and the music
that goes with it too, I thinkwas useful for denaturalizing
what we think a naturedocumentary is or should be when
we look at it from the distanceof an era that has a whole lot
of high budget blue planet, or,other, our oceans, other other
(21:03):
series that naturalize reactionsto the ocean.
Whereas, Paul LeVeil was usingsurrealist techniques to
produce, I think, the audience acertain sense of estrangement,
but also wonder at the sametime. And so, when I was coming
to, you know, to think aboutthese sea creatures and also
reading Stefan Helmrich's highlyinfluential book, Alien Ocean,
(21:27):
which is not, saying the oceanis alien, but rather saying
like, look, this trope of thealien ocean comes up all over
the place and we can see it in,the discourse of marine
microbiology and also in,documentaries that portray the
deep sea as a space of aliencreatures. Like, it's it's
important to be on the watch forthis. And I think to a certain
(21:50):
degree, there's been so muchalien ocean that in a way the
ocean is alien, doesn't have asmuch capacity to surprise us. So
something I share withsurrealism is thinking about
strategies to make it new or tomake things surprising again.
So I would try to recommend PaulLevy when ocean scientists ask
for recommendations because Ithink he's someone that is just
(22:11):
so instructive to turn to,today.
Ann Elias (22:15):
Absolutely. He yes, James Carl's book is excellent
on Paul Levey. And the way thewell, Levey is an artist,
scientist, surrealist who openspeople's eyes to the wonder of
marine animals. And an ethics ofcare about marine animals too,
(22:36):
the seahorse and also theoctopus. So that sense of
estrangement and wonder comesthrough so clearly, as you say,
from Pahlavi's work, which wasoften filmed using an aquarium.
But he also devised that camera,yeah, to go underwater as well.
(22:57):
But it was so much easier to usean aquarium. You could control
the spatial dimensions in whichyou filmed. There were the many
advantages of aquariums. And asa scientist, it was common
practice in the early 1920s whenhe was working to use an
aquarium.
But he did both. He also was adiver as you know, so that's of
(23:21):
interest. Melody, you've talkeda little bit about how you
transitioned from wild bluemedia to correlations. Just
turning to correlations a bitmore now. You start the book
with that Pantone advertisement,and most of my writing really
(23:45):
starts with a visual image too.
So I was happy to see that. Thatliving coral, that Pantone
twenty nineteen coral of theyear. Can you just take us
through that advertisement andwhy you found it a useful
launching point for the chaptersthat then follow in your book?
Melody Jue (24:06):
Oh, thank you for that question. Yeah. Once I
found this, I I knew this wasthis was the start. This was
going to this is gonna go at theat the at the front. So this
this advertisement from Pantone,every year, Pantone, which is
this color company, foradvertising, names its sort of
(24:27):
new color and then, advertisessort of a suite of, design ideas
around the color.
The one I found for the year,coral, was so noticeable because
it was occurring simultaneouslyas all this coral bleaching. And
so it I I looked at that and I'mgoing, the advertisement for
coral says like, oh, coralcolor. It's this sort of pinkish
(24:49):
orangish hue and it's buoyantand it's uplifting and full of
life. And I couldn't help butalso think of the ways that,
that stood in such starkcontrast to coral bleaching, the
sort of whiteness of coralbleaching. And, later found out
that there was this campaign tonudge Pantone to be a little bit
more environmentally consciousby saying like, oh, look, before
(25:11):
coral bleaches, it also turns aseries of these fluorescent
cues.
So sort of purples and yellows,that are noticeable. And so
there was an, a group thatworked with Pantone to, suggest
suggest these. And then as Ilooked into it more, I like,
well, the color coral, this alsooddly in a way is anchored to
(25:32):
one very particular coralorganism, the red coral in
Mediterranean, Coralis rubrum,which can be anywhere from sort
of a light pinkish to like sortof a stronger, stronger red
color or pink. And that seemedcurious to me too. Why develop
the icon, the color icon forcoral based on this one
(25:55):
particular coral, which seemedto center, Europe and the
Mediterranean at the at its atits core, but also to obscure
all these other corals.
And so I I looked at this as auseful window for pointing out
that the conditions of mediationunderwater, needed to change
depending on which coral was thefocus. Not just iconic red
(26:20):
coral, but potentially all theseother corals. So I brought up
purple soft corals earlier and,in the book, there's a chapter
on thinking through theconditions of mediation for soft
corals and why it might bedifficult to use some of the
same analogies to, books likecoral as growing all these
(26:42):
layers of a skeleton that can beread over time like tree rings,
or like a book of climatehistory. Those analogies to
coral being valuable as a recorddon't hold up when the coral is
soft bodied. And so I wanted tosuggest that, like, if you're
going to think aboutconservation messages for the
(27:05):
soft corals, these corals thatessentially melt underwater,
then you need different mediaanalogies and the book is not
just it's just not gonna cut itand nor is the, rhetoric of
inscription, which is speakingmore to a media theory audience
that, really wants to hold on tothat term.
Ann Elias (27:23):
One of the interesting things about maybe
correspondences between us isthat with Coral Empire, I wrote
a book about the development orthe evolution or construction of
the iconic image of tropicalcorals, stony corals, reef
building corals. But you'vewritten a book that critiques
(27:44):
the iconic image of coral. And Iwas wondering then, you've
started to talk about this. Whatare the implications of
correlating corals with thetropics? What's been
marginalized?
What's been overlooked in thatprocess? You mentioned soft
corals. What happens when weshift our attention to soft
(28:08):
corals or deep sea corals orcold water corals? I like the
example you gave of the coralsthat grow on the oil rigs. Do
you like to talk about them?
Melody Jue (28:19):
Yeah. And, I should mention like I see this work as
absolutely building on theinsights of coral empire about
the iconicity of the tropicalcorals because that's what
queued me into thinking, well,how did they come to be icons in
this way? Or just simply what ifthey weren't the icons? What if
a different coral was the modelfor imagining coral iconicity?
(28:42):
Through, a different invitationwith a project on the media sees
of the High North Atlantic, witha group of Norwegian scholars,
I'd been asked to write a longerchapter on, something related to
the, what they're calling theHigh North Atlantic and that,
through sort of, many twists andturns led me to, look into these
(29:06):
amazing, deep sea corals,Lophelia pertussis.
Although that name is sort ofunder revision at the moment,
it's the one that washistorically used for a long
time. And Lophelia pertussa arethese deep water corals and they
can live for thousands of years.And notably, they tend to
(29:28):
correlate, in their geographiclocation with sites of oil
extraction. So I looked to acouple science textbooks to
learn more about them. And Icame to these science textbooks
as an English professor, which,for me means paying attention
to, how are how are thesetextbooks, telling the you know,
(29:51):
telling a certain story aboutthe corals?
What what figurative languageare they using? What examples?
And one of the examples I cameacross had to do with, this one
engineer who, had worked withthe company Statoil and he,
noticed an anomaly in the sonar.The boat went to go check it
(30:11):
out. They lowered, sort oftheir, they lowered their
equipment down to take a sampleand then brought it back up
again.
And they were surprised to findthat this large cone shaped
anomaly sensed by sonar, was infact a, Lophelia, this huge reef
of Lophelia. And, in many placesthat drilling, had been
(30:34):
attempted, there were theselarge reefs of, Lophelia. And I
was so struck that, again, inone of these science textbooks,
I came across a reference thatsaid like this one reef of
Lophelia Pertusa, we named itafter an oil pipeline. So it was
called Halton Pipe Reef Cluster.That got me thinking about, oh,
well, you never think oftropical stony corals next to
(30:55):
sites of oil extraction.
So isn't this interesting thatall of a sudden corals spatially
correlate with this process, allthe human created infrastructure
that goes into it, whether thismeans pipelines or, rigs or the
boats, that are doing surveys,for for the oil companies. And I
(31:16):
think that that's that's a storythat hasn't been circulated,
enough. Whereas, the situationof coral bleaching, in places
that, as you in your book, CoralEmpire, have, you know, pointed
out often get conflated as kindof the same place in a lot of
(31:37):
photographic representation.
Ann Elias (31:39):
Yes. I I think your book is really important for
those alternative stories aboutcorals, ones that don't often
get heard. And it certainly gotme doing a bit more research and
finding that, in fact, there arecorals at the bottom of Sydney
Harbor that a lot of peoplewouldn't know about and that
also undergo bleaching and havedone recently with ocean
(32:03):
walling. But these are stories,as you say, that are not
circulated to the extent of thevery emotional subject of bone
white, bleached, stony coralsthat have become this ubiquitous
symbol of the oceanicAnthropocene. We've, as you say,
(32:25):
learned to correlate coral withliving tropical corals, and that
exotic orientalism of beautiful,rich colors shimmering under
clear, sparkling surfaces ofwater and so on.
Why do you think that tropicalcoral reefs have come to
(32:49):
symbolize the human guilt ofplanetary crisis rather than say
those soft corals that havebleached at the bottom of Sydney
Harbor, for example.
Melody Jue (33:01):
I kind of wonder about this too, and maybe it
goes back to what the stonycorals leave behind, which, for
a lot of reasons, you know,going back to the at this point,
almost over quoted Shakespearepassage in The Tempest about
Full Fathom Five, his fatherlies there, his bones are coral
(33:22):
made. Those are pearls that werehis eyes. And I may have missed
a word or two here, but theimage of human bones and the
echo with the stark bleach whiteimage of corals, it's it's sort
of, I think, powerful becauseit's undeniable that change has
happened and the literal takingaway of color, in in these sites
just, know, can't help but makean impact, on on viewers, you
(33:47):
know, quite viscerally andimmediately. Whereas
documentaries that, do talkabout the soft corals, do so in
relation to stony corals too. SoI'm thinking here of in chasing
coral, there is some interestingattention to soft corals.
But when the protagonist of thatdocumentary handles them, they
(34:10):
absolutely disintegrate in hishands. So I was really struck by
the difference between how softcorals, leave such less,
tangible of a trace, somethingthat is sort of slimy and,
viscerally compelling in itsdisintegration for the witness
that's personally there. But theso many corals leave behind an
(34:30):
image and I think that may bewhy it continues to be so
powerful.
Ann Elias (34:35):
Yes. That signification of bone or
skeleton seems to reallyresonate with the public
imagination. Maybe the questionof your book's title could come
up now, correlations. Are youinterested in correlations
between corals and humanactivities? Do you mean by
correlations acculturated habitsconnected with corals, such as
(35:01):
what we've been talking abouthere, the link between a stony
coral and an idea of culturalsignificance.
Could you just talk us a littlebit through your title?
Melody Jue (35:12):
Sure. Took me a while to sort of land on this
one. And when I when I did, thenI did a whole bunch of
background research anddiscovered, oh, there there have
been people who took up thistitle before as well. So I think
I mentioned Iris Braverman inthis really eloquent four page
essay and, also the artistNicholas Mangan. And then there
(35:35):
was even an environmental groupin the nineties, that named
itself correlations, through akind of acronym strategy.
And each of these was interestedin the correlations between
coral and climate, so in tracingcorrelations. And my book, tries
to think of that as a firststep. So what are the
(35:56):
correlations that we, as in asort of broad environmentally,
educated public have been havebeen making with corals, whether
this is with corals and humanvalues, corals and, different
cultural touchstones like coralsand Medusa, corals and bones, or
whether or not some of thesecorrelations should be rethought
(36:16):
to open reopen the category ofthe iconic to let other, other
corals in, and then imaginealternative correlations, that
maybe had been submerged, thathad been, not traced or told.
And, I mean, as we spoke aboutearlier, one of the major ones I
hit upon was the correlationbetween deep sea corals and oil,
(36:39):
which came into the newssomewhat during the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill. But I'm notsure it has come into the kind
of representationalconsciousness that we we study
in visual culture quite quite aseffectively.
So that seems to me like a placeto push a little bit more.
Ann Elias (36:58):
Well, I think you have done that very well with
the the book. Congratulations onthat. Just wondering where
you're going from here.
Melody Jue (37:05):
You know, interestingly, I've been writing
about seaweeds for a long time.So the correlations project
really was a pause that I tookin the seaweed writing to, to
sit down and complete, what forme was was is a short because
this is with the MinnesotaForerunner series, a short and
doable book. So, because I couldsee I could see the end, I I sat
(37:30):
down I sat down and wrote it. Soat this point, I think I'm I'm
gonna be turning back to some ofthe, material on seaweeds and
mediation, and also thinkingabout this, this trope of
seaweeds as messianic figuresfor addressing climate change
and the way they're, imagined asbeing kind of a future of
(37:52):
aquaculture, to sequestercarbon, able to substitute for
petroleum based plastics, andsee where this goes. But I'm not
sure yet what genre or shapethat's going to take quite yet.
But the title of this in someform will be Holding Sway.
Ann Elias (38:10):
Oh that's lovely. I very much like those pressed
seaweeds which are so much partof women's culture in the
nineteenth century. Visiting theseaside and the culture that
went with visiting the seaside,pressing seaweeds. There's some
beautiful collections andlibraries of pressed seaweeds.
For myself, I'm heading in thedirection of mollusks, mollusk
shells.
(38:30):
Yeah, scientific illustrations,I think. I've come across some
alluring scientificillustrations of mollusk shells
by a scientist called CharlesHeadley, who lived in New
Zealand. I think he lived in TheUnited States at some point, but
also in Australia. And a kind ofunderrepresented scientist, and
(38:52):
I thought I'd start with hisillustrations. But again, I'm
not quite sure what directionI'm going in with that.
Melody, it's been so greattalking with you. Thanks for
having me as a guest today. I'djust like to say how exciting it
has been to read both yourbooks.
Melody Jue (39:07):
Thank you for being such an amazing oceanic
interlocutor for thisconversation. And I very much
look forward to reading yourwork on the Sydney Harbor as
it's coming out. And it's been apleasure to speak about diving
in all things oceanic withcorrelations. So, thank you for
making the time to speak today.
Ann Elias (39:24):
Thank you.
Narrator (39:26):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The bookCorrelations by Melody Jue is
available from University ofMinnesota Press. Thank you for
listening.
In many places that drilling had been attempted,
there were these large reefs ofI came across a reference that
said like this one reef ofLophelia Pertusa, we named it
after an oil pipeline.
Ann Elias (00:17):
What are the implications of correlating
corals with the tropics? What'sbeen marginalized? What's been
overlooked in that process?
Melody Jue (00:30):
Hi. My name is Melody Jue. I'm associate
professor of English at UC SantaBarbara. I'm a scholar in the
ocean humanities and the authorof Wild Blue Media, Thinking
Through Seawater, as well as theco editor with Rafiko Vries of
Saturation and ElementalPolitics. I'll briefly introduce
how correlations got started.
This began with an invitation todevelop a three day short
(00:54):
lecture course for a graduateseminar at, summer school in
Bologna in collaboration withDuke University. And I was
racking my mind for what scaleof material I had that would
suit three days. And I noticedthat a number of books had been
accumulating on my bookshelfaround the topic of coral, coral
empire being one of these, byAna Elias. As I sat with the
(01:17):
material, I began to think abouthow media and mediation emerged
in each of these texts, as wellas what the texts didn't
address, which were the weirdcorals, so soft corals, deep
water corals, any corals outsidethe sphere of the tropics or
outside the materiality of thestony. And this led me to think
about the significance of nonnormative corals in certain ways
(01:40):
and became the chapters thatturned into the book
correlations.
The title could have beenuncorrelating or uncorrelated,
but correlations seem simpleenough to to stick with and
echoes other iterations by IrisBraverman, Nicholas Mangan, and
others who've also beenattracted to playing with the
(02:01):
pun of choral and relation orchoral and correlation. I'll
leave it there and welcomequestions from Analyas today.
Ann Elias (02:10):
Thank you Melody and it's so good to meet you here
today. It's lovely. I'mProfessor Emeritus of Visual
Culture at the University ofSydney. I've lived half my life
in Auckland, New Zealand but mylife as an academic has been in
Sydney, Australia. I'vepublished books on camouflage in
(02:31):
art, war, and nature, on flowersin natural history and art, and
on the underwater aesthetics oftropical seas.
My last book, Coral Empire,which you mentioned, Melody, was
published in 2019, and itdiscusses the adventures of
early photographers in tropicalwaters at The Bahamas and also
(02:52):
the Australian Great BarrierReef. My more recent work
investigates early theories ofunderwater optics and subaquatic
animals, including fish andscallops. Looking particularly
at an English naturalist,Francis Ward, I'm always first
and foremost interested invisualizations of the
(03:13):
underwater, and this takes meinto areas of illustration,
photography and filmmaking, andsometimes painting. I'm
completing a new book on thecultural history of the
underwater regions of SydneyHarbour, and it continues an
inquiry into human entanglementswith oceans. And here, I think,
(03:34):
is the crossover with Melody'sresearch.
So, Melody, you do suchinteresting work on oceans, and
thank you for referring to mybook Coral Empire in your book
Correlations.
Melody Jue (03:47):
It was such a huge influence. I found it so useful
to build on your insights aboutthe optical medium of seawater
and the way it was extending,the lens of the camera through
its clarity in the in thesituation of the tropics. And
that really helped me thinkthrough what was going on
differently in, spaces wherecoral couldn't be sensed in that
(04:07):
same way, such as in the deepocean where a lot of acoustics
were used to sense corals andwhere they were, instead.
There's just so much, I think,to imagine then with that that
one insight about the extensionof the lens through seawater,
such as what other what otherextensions are there in the
ocean or through the sensorycapacities of sea creatures. So
(04:28):
I really tuned into when yousaid scallops, which, you know,
where, where you're taking, thevisuality of the scallop, which
has those lovely, almost bluepearl like eyes that are light
sensitive.
Ann Elias (04:41):
One of the interesting things I found about
scallops, and and and I came atthem through an image. I learned
that a scallop has up to 200eyes across the mantle of its
shells, and that intrigued me tostart with. And then I learned
that Henri Bergson wasinterested in scallops and how
he developed his philosophy ofthe convergence of human and
(05:04):
mollusk evolution from thescallop. It all corresponded
with some research I was doingon a marine scientist,
Australian, William Dakin. So itall kind of tied in.
So I'm not surprised you'reinterested in that particular
mollusk. But I really feel likethere are some synergies between
(05:25):
correlations, as you say, andcoral empire that do relate to
that mediation of a very cleartropical sea that photographers
figured drew them because therewas some correspondence between
the idea of developing aphotograph and the idea of the
(05:45):
coral organism developing too inthese warm waters. So I thought
that was great. But also I thinkthere are some synergies with my
new book, The Under Harbour. AndI think the two areas I would
pick up on here are diving andcorals.
I wondered if we could startwith your previous work, Wild
Blue Media, and the subject ofdiving. My last two books, Coral
(06:07):
Empire, the one I'm writing nowon the Under Harbor, foreground
the practice of diving, that islike diving suits and
submersibles and how they openedup the undersea to art, science,
and popular culture at the turnof the twentieth century, and
kind of revealed it as awondrous but also frightening
environment, and an environmentreadily exploitable for industry
(06:30):
and profit. So for me, diving isa discursive inquiry. I I use a
wide range of historical sourcesfrom newspapers to diaries. But
for you, it's an embodied andeffective inquiry.
You submerge to think in andthrough seawater, as you put it.
(06:51):
And Wild Blue Media is a milieuspecific analysis of the sea
written as a scuba diver andacademic, which I love. And you
talk about thinking about whatit means to immerse in the ocean
and to quote you, the conditionsof perception. So I'm really
keen to hear more about thethings that scuba diving has
(07:13):
taught you as a humanitiesscholar, either about knowledge
or a philosophy of care or asyou put it, acculturated habits
of thinking. And whether you arecontinuing to learn about oceans
and culture with your successivedives.
Melody Jue (07:29):
That was such a lovely framing, and I'm so happy
to talk about diving. As I'verevisited the work in Wild Blue
Media, I started thinking moreabout the quality interpretation
or the way that diving affordscertain possibilities of
underwater interpretation andwhat that could mean. That has
everything to do withdifferences in the visuality of
(07:50):
the world underwater and whetheror not you bring a flashlight
and also how your own movementand being moved by the ocean
affects the possibilities ofinterpretation for a given site.
So access is constrained orenabled by how the ocean itself
is moving. In correlations, Iactually talk about a different
(08:13):
iteration of this by brieflyreflecting on some diving I was
doing in Fiji in 2020, just justbefore the pandemic.
And there's this one drift dive,which is where the boat drops
you off on one end of thecurrent and you drift, you
descend and then drift along awall, and then the boat will
pick you up at another location.So sometimes these dives take a
(08:34):
bit of coordination because ofhow you need to be mindful of
where the where the pickup pointis so you don't get carried off.
On this one wall, there were anumber of, purple soft corals.
There was a couple times wherewe were drifting along and I
wanted to pause to look at thecoral, but the current was so
strong that I couldn't do thisin the same way. So, the
(08:56):
possibility of even taking aphotograph was made difficult by
the conditions of even observingthe corals in the first place.
And yet that current was soimportant for the purple soft
corals themselves, which wouldbloom, or inflate and feed on
the particles of water driftingby when the current was active.
(09:17):
And so the strength of thecurrent had everything to do
with the timing of when thesepurple soft corals were
blooming. So being able to seethem in that state was also the
same condition of possibilitythat delimited stain put to to,
to see and to observe what theylooked like a little closer, not
(09:37):
wanting to touch them,obviously, but wanting to come a
little bit closer to the wall.Given my background in science
and technology studies andthinking a whole lot about Donna
Haraway's situated knowledges,you know, I got to the point
where I was began to care aboutwhat the conditions of
possibility for visiting, seen,interpreting underwater places
really were. Now, one thingthat's changed in my life since
(09:59):
writing Wild Blue Media, where Iwas thinking a lot about
normative habits of embodimentas a new diver and getting used
to what other scuba diversconsider to be normative habits,
like making sure you'restreamlined, horizontal, tucking
in all your your, regulator andthe other hoses hanging off you
so that they didn't hitanything, that sort of thing.
I have a 1.5 year old daughterand this has presented
(10:22):
conditions where I haven't beenable to get in the water for
almost three years now. So I wasthinking that this is a bit like
a voluntary selkie storycondition, the selkie story
being part of this northernEuropean mythology where these
seal women would emerge onlands, put their skins aside. It
was, you know, thefted by someman who was holding it, and then
(10:45):
they were compelled to be athome. My version of that is not
not quite so patriarchal. Thisis all voluntary, but I think a
lot about how my scuba tank hasbecome a doorstop recently and
how my wet suit has also beensitting on the hangar.
And these are things to which Iwill return, I know one day
soon. But the selfie story keepsreturning to me because of
Lauren Buke's, amazing shortstory, Her Seal Skin Coat, which
(11:09):
imagines the vicariousexperience of of being with a
seal through this futuristictechnology called a seal skin
that would allow you to go intoa sensory immersion tank and re,
experience the transmittedsensory experiences of a wettle
seal as it was coursing throughthe Antarctic. So more recently
I have not been in the water butI'm thinking about it.
Ann Elias (11:32):
Yeah, for sure because certainly having a child
does change life but you alsoturn that into a kind of
philosophical question, which istypical of your kind of
thinking. But I was reallyinterested in how you were
talking there about noticing themore than human as a diver and
how the ocean moves and movingwith the ocean and going with
(11:56):
the flow, you know, noticing thepurple soft corals and enjoying
the strong currents. And I'lltell you why that interests me.
I've been looking at diving froman earlier era, and that is the
turn of the twentieth century.And the kinds of divers who
speak about their experiences asdivers were often industrial and
(12:19):
professional hard hat divers,trades people that worked
underwater.
Their pre Anthropocene, if youlike, perspective on the
undersea was that it was a placeto battle, a place to have a
fight, a fight with the tides,to go against the flow, and I
(12:39):
guess this is your point, thatyou're involved with the
politics of noticing, and ecopolitics that the early
twentieth century didn't share.There was really no ethics of
care that you talk about in 1900among the kinds of divers that
I've been researching, theycertainly didn't nurture that
kind of ecological care for theunderwater. You talk about
(13:03):
diving engendering a distinctkind of subject position, I'm
just quoting you here, involvingtemporary alienation from the
land that perhaps provides thepreconditions of an ethics of
care. I think that's a lovelyquote. In fact, I've put it in
my new book.
But the divers who I've beenresearching, Melody, and who
worked underwater in the Port OfSydney Harbor saw themselves in
(13:27):
combat with the tides and rocksand mud, and their engagement
with the underwater was sensory,but it didn't lead to feelings
of connectedness ratheropposition. Since then, of
course, we've had climate changeand you are a product in a
sense, not a product, that's abad word, but you are a
philosophical emergence of somuch political discussion about
(13:52):
the need for an ethics of carethat is contemporary. But you do
have this really interestingcontext which is those early
divers. And I was thinking maybethe scientific divers. Are you
interested in people likeWilliam Beebe?
Oh, Cousteau, obviously. SylviaEarle?
Melody Jue (14:09):
Yeah. Sylvia Earle, I think, has care to start with.
And, you know, maybe, Cousteauis a good sort of hinge figure
between the military attitudethat I'm going to sort of war
against the sea or win againstthis fish I'm trying to spear or
embody some kind ofconfrontational struggle as
opposed to sort of swimming withbecause Cousteau has that whole
(14:32):
change where he he becomesenvironmentalist after he sees
more about how the oceans arechanging compared to his first
documentary, The Silent World,that contemporary
environmentalists would see andgo, like, you use dynamite to
blow up underwater and thenbring all these fish to the
surface. He makes a change fromthat. His book, The Silent
World, I found so useful forthinking about the phenomenology
(14:55):
of diving because it was therethat he was really reflecting on
a lot of the more pleasurablesensory qualities of swimming
underwater.
But at the time, like, those twowere co present for him. I want
to go back to maybe somethingyou said too about these
confrontational attitudestowards the ocean that are
undergirded by a lot of militaryfigurative language or
(15:16):
metaphors. And I just, taughtthis book California Against the
Sea, which is by the LA Times,journalist Rosanna Shah. And
that against in the title endedup being so important for some
of the, detrimental attitudestowards sea level rise
adaptation she was talkingabout. Like a lot of people
(15:38):
don't know that sea seawalls,erecting these seawalls always
causes erosion later down thebeach.
So to make one and protect oneproperty implies erosion later.
And, of course, these arefavored by entities in The
United States where I'm based bythe Army Corps of Engineers. And
through interviews, Xia talksabout how no one likes the words
(15:59):
managed retreat because itimplies losing somehow. So she
and others have given a lot ofthought to what a more
efficacious rhetoric is fordescribing relation between
communities and sea level risethat doesn't draw on the
language of militaryinvigorations, like war, combat,
or even the prepositions likeagainst. I also wanted to
(16:22):
mention one other thoughtregarding the divers and how
they think of themselves.
I think for for your new work,that seems like such a
productive question just topause and understand that, you
know, not all divers over timeand also by community have
thought of themselves in in thesame way. So in Santa Barbara,
there's a whole diving communityI have not communicated with
(16:42):
that, trains in industrialdiving. And I imagine, you know,
would have a different relationto their time underwater. But
something I've observed withrecreational divers, many people
pride themselves on the abilityto use their air tank well. So
this means maximizing theirbottom time, not exerting
(17:04):
themselves so much throughchasing something, through doing
the kind of, hard swimming thatwould raise your heartbeat a
lot.
They see the mark of anaccomplished diver as maximizing
your air. And to do that, youactually really have to relax a
whole lot. The more you canrelax and, just sip your air as
opposed to guzzle your air, thelonger you can spend underwater.
(17:29):
And there's, one who's like, ohyeah, I used to hang out and at
90 feet with my friend for likethe whole time and everyone else
had already gone up and theirtechnique was just sipping on
the air and, achieving this,this state of very meditative
relaxation. And I can't think ofanything that is so, you know,
different from the kind oftension or, wall like rigidity
(17:54):
of a military attitude.
Ann Elias (17:57):
Yeah. For sure. I mean, that idea of meditation
and relaxation certainly didn'tcome into the divers who I'm
thinking about who use dynamiteto remove rocks and
obstructions. They they dredgedthe sand. They reshaped the
shoreline.
They built the seawalls, all thethings that you mentioned
before. One of the questions oneof the crossovers I think that's
(18:20):
interesting for me with yourwork is that well, first of all,
I became interested the underseathrough surrealism and the
influence of surrealism as anart movement, where artists took
interest in the undersea to findunsettling images that were
alien to everyday rationalexperience. And they wanted to
(18:42):
encourage others audiences toimagine the world differently
through the undersea as a fluidshape shifting realm like a
dream. But you're interested inthe idea of the alien ocean
through the perspective ofscience fiction, and I thought
you could just talk about thatfor a few minutes if you don't
(19:03):
mind.
Melody Jue (19:04):
You know, I actually have a surrealism connection
too, and it's the documentariesof Jean Paul Levet. When I was
in graduate school, they hadbeen recently, released by
Criterion Collection. There's abook in a booklet that went with
this by the title Science isFiction, which is sort of a fun
inversion on science fiction,but science as fiction, which is
a little bit delivered with awink and a nod perhaps.
(19:27):
Palmolive, who James Leo Cahillhas, written about much, much
more extensively in hisexcellent book on Palmolive.
Palmolive was trained as ascientist, but was also going to
the cinema in Paris in the 20sand 30s, very regularly, and had
this interest in sea creatures.
And so even though Wild Bloomidadoesn't have a chapter on him,
(19:49):
as I was developing the book,like, was thinking about Pompeo,
quite a bit, including aboutincluding connections that are
well known in between scienceand surrealism, like the
automaticity of the camera andautomatic writing or sort of
this automatic viewing and thefantastical shapes of the sea
creatures. And, the one aboutthe seahorse, that Pon Levet
(20:15):
filmed also had some interestingconnections with sort of the,
musing on the upright posture ofthe seahorse and like, oh, maybe
we identify with the seahorse alittle bit more because we too
are vertical beings that have anupright posture. And I'm not
quoting him directly there, butthere is there is something on
the on the verticality. And so,so his profiles on sea creatures
(20:39):
and invitation to take thescience seriously, but also
think about how it's assembled,how it's ordered, and the music
that goes with it too, I thinkwas useful for denaturalizing
what we think a naturedocumentary is or should be when
we look at it from the distanceof an era that has a whole lot
of high budget blue planet, or,other, our oceans, other other
(21:03):
series that naturalize reactionsto the ocean.
Whereas, Paul LeVeil was usingsurrealist techniques to
produce, I think, the audience acertain sense of estrangement,
but also wonder at the sametime. And so, when I was coming
to, you know, to think aboutthese sea creatures and also
reading Stefan Helmrich's highlyinfluential book, Alien Ocean,
(21:27):
which is not, saying the oceanis alien, but rather saying
like, look, this trope of thealien ocean comes up all over
the place and we can see it in,the discourse of marine
microbiology and also in,documentaries that portray the
deep sea as a space of aliencreatures. Like, it's it's
important to be on the watch forthis. And I think to a certain
(21:50):
degree, there's been so muchalien ocean that in a way the
ocean is alien, doesn't have asmuch capacity to surprise us. So
something I share withsurrealism is thinking about
strategies to make it new or tomake things surprising again.
So I would try to recommend PaulLevy when ocean scientists ask
for recommendations because Ithink he's someone that is just
(22:11):
so instructive to turn to,today.
Ann Elias (22:15):
Absolutely. He yes, James Carl's book is excellent
on Paul Levey. And the way thewell, Levey is an artist,
scientist, surrealist who openspeople's eyes to the wonder of
marine animals. And an ethics ofcare about marine animals too,
(22:36):
the seahorse and also theoctopus. So that sense of
estrangement and wonder comesthrough so clearly, as you say,
from Pahlavi's work, which wasoften filmed using an aquarium.
But he also devised that camera,yeah, to go underwater as well.
(22:57):
But it was so much easier to usean aquarium. You could control
the spatial dimensions in whichyou filmed. There were the many
advantages of aquariums. And asa scientist, it was common
practice in the early 1920s whenhe was working to use an
aquarium.
But he did both. He also was adiver as you know, so that's of
(23:21):
interest. Melody, you've talkeda little bit about how you
transitioned from wild bluemedia to correlations. Just
turning to correlations a bitmore now. You start the book
with that Pantone advertisement,and most of my writing really
(23:45):
starts with a visual image too.
So I was happy to see that. Thatliving coral, that Pantone
twenty nineteen coral of theyear. Can you just take us
through that advertisement andwhy you found it a useful
launching point for the chaptersthat then follow in your book?
Melody Jue (24:06):
Oh, thank you for that question. Yeah. Once I
found this, I I knew this wasthis was the start. This was
going to this is gonna go at theat the at the front. So this
this advertisement from Pantone,every year, Pantone, which is
this color company, foradvertising, names its sort of
(24:27):
new color and then, advertisessort of a suite of, design ideas
around the color.
The one I found for the year,coral, was so noticeable because
it was occurring simultaneouslyas all this coral bleaching. And
so it I I looked at that and I'mgoing, the advertisement for
coral says like, oh, coralcolor. It's this sort of pinkish
(24:49):
orangish hue and it's buoyantand it's uplifting and full of
life. And I couldn't help butalso think of the ways that,
that stood in such starkcontrast to coral bleaching, the
sort of whiteness of coralbleaching. And, later found out
that there was this campaign tonudge Pantone to be a little bit
more environmentally consciousby saying like, oh, look, before
(25:11):
coral bleaches, it also turns aseries of these fluorescent
cues.
So sort of purples and yellows,that are noticeable. And so
there was an, a group thatworked with Pantone to, suggest
suggest these. And then as Ilooked into it more, I like,
well, the color coral, this alsooddly in a way is anchored to
(25:32):
one very particular coralorganism, the red coral in
Mediterranean, Coralis rubrum,which can be anywhere from sort
of a light pinkish to like sortof a stronger, stronger red
color or pink. And that seemedcurious to me too. Why develop
the icon, the color icon forcoral based on this one
(25:55):
particular coral, which seemedto center, Europe and the
Mediterranean at the at its atits core, but also to obscure
all these other corals.
And so I I looked at this as auseful window for pointing out
that the conditions of mediationunderwater, needed to change
depending on which coral was thefocus. Not just iconic red
(26:20):
coral, but potentially all theseother corals. So I brought up
purple soft corals earlier and,in the book, there's a chapter
on thinking through theconditions of mediation for soft
corals and why it might bedifficult to use some of the
same analogies to, books likecoral as growing all these
(26:42):
layers of a skeleton that can beread over time like tree rings,
or like a book of climatehistory. Those analogies to
coral being valuable as a recorddon't hold up when the coral is
soft bodied. And so I wanted tosuggest that, like, if you're
going to think aboutconservation messages for the
(27:05):
soft corals, these corals thatessentially melt underwater,
then you need different mediaanalogies and the book is not
just it's just not gonna cut itand nor is the, rhetoric of
inscription, which is speakingmore to a media theory audience
that, really wants to hold on tothat term.
Ann Elias (27:23):
One of the interesting things about maybe
correspondences between us isthat with Coral Empire, I wrote
a book about the development orthe evolution or construction of
the iconic image of tropicalcorals, stony corals, reef
building corals. But you'vewritten a book that critiques
(27:44):
the iconic image of coral. And Iwas wondering then, you've
started to talk about this. Whatare the implications of
correlating corals with thetropics? What's been
marginalized?
What's been overlooked in thatprocess? You mentioned soft
corals. What happens when weshift our attention to soft
(28:08):
corals or deep sea corals orcold water corals? I like the
example you gave of the coralsthat grow on the oil rigs. Do
you like to talk about them?
Melody Jue (28:19):
Yeah. And, I should mention like I see this work as
absolutely building on theinsights of coral empire about
the iconicity of the tropicalcorals because that's what
queued me into thinking, well,how did they come to be icons in
this way? Or just simply what ifthey weren't the icons? What if
a different coral was the modelfor imagining coral iconicity?
(28:42):
Through, a different invitationwith a project on the media sees
of the High North Atlantic, witha group of Norwegian scholars,
I'd been asked to write a longerchapter on, something related to
the, what they're calling theHigh North Atlantic and that,
through sort of, many twists andturns led me to, look into these
(29:06):
amazing, deep sea corals,Lophelia pertussis.
Although that name is sort ofunder revision at the moment,
it's the one that washistorically used for a long
time. And Lophelia pertussa arethese deep water corals and they
can live for thousands of years.And notably, they tend to
(29:28):
correlate, in their geographiclocation with sites of oil
extraction. So I looked to acouple science textbooks to
learn more about them. And Icame to these science textbooks
as an English professor, which,for me means paying attention
to, how are how are thesetextbooks, telling the you know,
(29:51):
telling a certain story aboutthe corals?
What what figurative languageare they using? What examples?
And one of the examples I cameacross had to do with, this one
engineer who, had worked withthe company Statoil and he,
noticed an anomaly in the sonar.The boat went to go check it
(30:11):
out. They lowered, sort oftheir, they lowered their
equipment down to take a sampleand then brought it back up
again.
And they were surprised to findthat this large cone shaped
anomaly sensed by sonar, was infact a, Lophelia, this huge reef
of Lophelia. And, in many placesthat drilling, had been
(30:34):
attempted, there were theselarge reefs of, Lophelia. And I
was so struck that, again, inone of these science textbooks,
I came across a reference thatsaid like this one reef of
Lophelia Pertusa, we named itafter an oil pipeline. So it was
called Halton Pipe Reef Cluster.That got me thinking about, oh,
well, you never think oftropical stony corals next to
(30:55):
sites of oil extraction.
So isn't this interesting thatall of a sudden corals spatially
correlate with this process, allthe human created infrastructure
that goes into it, whether thismeans pipelines or, rigs or the
boats, that are doing surveys,for for the oil companies. And I
(31:16):
think that that's that's a storythat hasn't been circulated,
enough. Whereas, the situationof coral bleaching, in places
that, as you in your book, CoralEmpire, have, you know, pointed
out often get conflated as kindof the same place in a lot of
(31:37):
photographic representation.
Ann Elias (31:39):
Yes. I I think your book is really important for
those alternative stories aboutcorals, ones that don't often
get heard. And it certainly gotme doing a bit more research and
finding that, in fact, there arecorals at the bottom of Sydney
Harbor that a lot of peoplewouldn't know about and that
also undergo bleaching and havedone recently with ocean
(32:03):
walling. But these are stories,as you say, that are not
circulated to the extent of thevery emotional subject of bone
white, bleached, stony coralsthat have become this ubiquitous
symbol of the oceanicAnthropocene. We've, as you say,
(32:25):
learned to correlate coral withliving tropical corals, and that
exotic orientalism of beautiful,rich colors shimmering under
clear, sparkling surfaces ofwater and so on.
Why do you think that tropicalcoral reefs have come to
(32:49):
symbolize the human guilt ofplanetary crisis rather than say
those soft corals that havebleached at the bottom of Sydney
Harbor, for example.
Melody Jue (33:01):
I kind of wonder about this too, and maybe it
goes back to what the stonycorals leave behind, which, for
a lot of reasons, you know,going back to the at this point,
almost over quoted Shakespearepassage in The Tempest about
Full Fathom Five, his fatherlies there, his bones are coral
(33:22):
made. Those are pearls that werehis eyes. And I may have missed
a word or two here, but theimage of human bones and the
echo with the stark bleach whiteimage of corals, it's it's sort
of, I think, powerful becauseit's undeniable that change has
happened and the literal takingaway of color, in in these sites
just, know, can't help but makean impact, on on viewers, you
(33:47):
know, quite viscerally andimmediately. Whereas
documentaries that, do talkabout the soft corals, do so in
relation to stony corals too. SoI'm thinking here of in chasing
coral, there is some interestingattention to soft corals.
But when the protagonist of thatdocumentary handles them, they
(34:10):
absolutely disintegrate in hishands. So I was really struck by
the difference between how softcorals, leave such less,
tangible of a trace, somethingthat is sort of slimy and,
viscerally compelling in itsdisintegration for the witness
that's personally there. But theso many corals leave behind an
(34:30):
image and I think that may bewhy it continues to be so
powerful.
Ann Elias (34:35):
Yes. That signification of bone or
skeleton seems to reallyresonate with the public
imagination. Maybe the questionof your book's title could come
up now, correlations. Are youinterested in correlations
between corals and humanactivities? Do you mean by
correlations acculturated habitsconnected with corals, such as
(35:01):
what we've been talking abouthere, the link between a stony
coral and an idea of culturalsignificance.
Could you just talk us a littlebit through your title?
Melody Jue (35:12):
Sure. Took me a while to sort of land on this
one. And when I when I did, thenI did a whole bunch of
background research anddiscovered, oh, there there have
been people who took up thistitle before as well. So I think
I mentioned Iris Braverman inthis really eloquent four page
essay and, also the artistNicholas Mangan. And then there
(35:35):
was even an environmental groupin the nineties, that named
itself correlations, through akind of acronym strategy.
And each of these was interestedin the correlations between
coral and climate, so in tracingcorrelations. And my book, tries
to think of that as a firststep. So what are the
(35:56):
correlations that we, as in asort of broad environmentally,
educated public have been havebeen making with corals, whether
this is with corals and humanvalues, corals and, different
cultural touchstones like coralsand Medusa, corals and bones, or
whether or not some of thesecorrelations should be rethought
(36:16):
to open reopen the category ofthe iconic to let other, other
corals in, and then imaginealternative correlations, that
maybe had been submerged, thathad been, not traced or told.
And, I mean, as we spoke aboutearlier, one of the major ones I
hit upon was the correlationbetween deep sea corals and oil,
(36:39):
which came into the newssomewhat during the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill. But I'm notsure it has come into the kind
of representationalconsciousness that we we study
in visual culture quite quite aseffectively.
So that seems to me like a placeto push a little bit more.
Ann Elias (36:58):
Well, I think you have done that very well with
the the book. Congratulations onthat. Just wondering where
you're going from here.
Melody Jue (37:05):
You know, interestingly, I've been writing
about seaweeds for a long time.So the correlations project
really was a pause that I tookin the seaweed writing to, to
sit down and complete, what forme was was is a short because
this is with the MinnesotaForerunner series, a short and
doable book. So, because I couldsee I could see the end, I I sat
(37:30):
down I sat down and wrote it. Soat this point, I think I'm I'm
gonna be turning back to some ofthe, material on seaweeds and
mediation, and also thinkingabout this, this trope of
seaweeds as messianic figuresfor addressing climate change
and the way they're, imagined asbeing kind of a future of
(37:52):
aquaculture, to sequestercarbon, able to substitute for
petroleum based plastics, andsee where this goes. But I'm not
sure yet what genre or shapethat's going to take quite yet.
But the title of this in someform will be Holding Sway.
Ann Elias (38:10):
Oh that's lovely. I very much like those pressed
seaweeds which are so much partof women's culture in the
nineteenth century. Visiting theseaside and the culture that
went with visiting the seaside,pressing seaweeds. There's some
beautiful collections andlibraries of pressed seaweeds.
For myself, I'm heading in thedirection of mollusks, mollusk
shells.
(38:30):
Yeah, scientific illustrations,I think. I've come across some
alluring scientificillustrations of mollusk shells
by a scientist called CharlesHeadley, who lived in New
Zealand. I think he lived in TheUnited States at some point, but
also in Australia. And a kind ofunderrepresented scientist, and
(38:52):
I thought I'd start with hisillustrations. But again, I'm
not quite sure what directionI'm going in with that.
Melody, it's been so greattalking with you. Thanks for
having me as a guest today. I'djust like to say how exciting it
has been to read both yourbooks.
Melody Jue (39:07):
Thank you for being such an amazing oceanic
interlocutor for thisconversation. And I very much
look forward to reading yourwork on the Sydney Harbor as
it's coming out. And it's been apleasure to speak about diving
in all things oceanic withcorrelations. So, thank you for
making the time to speak today.
Ann Elias (39:24):
Thank you.
Narrator (39:26):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The bookCorrelations by Melody Jue is
available from University ofMinnesota Press. Thank you for
listening.
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