A literary and cultural history of coral—as an essential element
of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity,
and a powerful political metaphor Today, coral and the human-caused
threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary
crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something
else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it
shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral
Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an
essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal
ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers
as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once
helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of
interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a
coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others. Navakas
shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of
slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work.
If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a
metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them,
by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is
in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s
trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been
conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than
biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political
imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.
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