Hokusai's Great Wave Enters the Anthropocene

Bibliographic Data

ID2428587
AuthorsStefan Helmreich (0000-0003-0859-5881, Katsushika Medical Center, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume7
Issue1
Pages203-217
Publication date2016-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-3616407
OpenAlexW2321223189
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

Hokusai's 1829 woodblock print, "Under the Wave off Kanagawa," is the world's most iconic portrait of ocean waves.It has been reproduced, quoted, and repurposed over the last two centuries in a widening circle of representations of the unruly, powerful sea.Today's reimaginings of this storied Japanese image often remark upon the dangerous, damaged state of the contemporary ocean.Such commentaries sometimes refer directly to the 2011 tsunami and to its associated Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.But adaptations of Hokusai's Wave these days also increasingly point to more general anxieties about catastrophic climate change and to worries about ocean pollution, acidification, and plastification.In such usages, the Wave operates as a synecdoche for, a symbolic capture of, the difficult-to-apprehend vastness of the ever-moving, interconnecting, and possibly threatening sea. 1 Hokusai's image has thus lately been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene-a provocative, and, so far, unofficial, geological term that postulates that humans (anthropos) have come to have significant deleterious effects on planetary ecosystems, effects that can be identified not only in the stratigraphic record, but also in the body of Earth's ocean. 2 If "Under the Wave at Kanagawa" (also "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" or, simply, "The Great Wave") in its early circulations emblematized the historical relation of Japan to the sea and to the transnational connections the sea afforded, re-imaginings today adapt the image to speak to contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.Such reimaginings of the Great Wave do so, significantly, by drawing attention to the materials of which such critical artworks are nowadays frequently made: plastic, trash, and other sea-borne detritus-the flotsam and jetsam of a sea damaged by the deleterious geohistorical practices of (some) humans.Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies argue that "the Anthropocene is primarily a sensorial phenomenon: the experience of living in an increasingly diminished and toxic world." 3 Contemporary revisions of Hokusai's Wave do indeed operate in the realm of the sensorially unsettling-although, perhaps contrary to Davis and Turpin's argument, they do so precisely by bringing into experience that which might otherwise be far away or beyond everyday apprehension and scale (e.g., islands of swirling ocean trash in the far middle of the Pacific).Such works also, through the garbage they incorporate, call into question the

Anthropocene · Archaeology · Environmental ethics · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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