Introduction to coastal imaginaries: Anxiety,liminality,power and cultural construction

Abstract

This special issue explores the theme of ‘coastal imaginaries’ as a lens for understanding how coastlines and waterfronts have been perceived and represented across various historical periods and cultural contexts. Drawing on multi-disciplinary research, the collection of articles moves beyond viewing coastal spaces as mere physical locations, highlighting them as dynamic arenas actively shaped by human imagination, societal anxieties, and cultural values. The notion of the coast as a messy, intermediate and liminal space is central, where boundaries between land and water, civilisation and the unknown, and different social behaviours are negotiated and contested. Recurring themes include the coast as a site for projected anxieties, a liminal space for encounters and negotiations, and an arena for contested power and social control. The collection highlights the interplay between imagined perceptions and the lived realities of coastal environments, offering insights into the cultural complexities of these regions. The chronology of the articles spans from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and explore coastal imaginaries through a variety of mediums including archival material, newspapers, and film. This is the first of two issues exploring ‘Coastal Imaginaries’, the second of which will focus on ‘haunted space, story and place’.

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out’. – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) ¹

Joseph Conrad’s observations about how the coast could all at once appear as alluring, mysterious and dangerous, vividly captures the ambiguity of the waterfront in the popular imagination. Drawing on research from multi-disciplined scholars, this and a future special issue of the journal invites readers – as Conrad put it – to ‘come and find out’ how coastal imaginations have shaped our understanding of waterfronts from around the globe.

The idea for these special issues came from a variety of collaborations and workshops organised by the Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures at the University of Portsmouth. ² For over 10 years we undertook to explore the waterfront through a cultural lens, breaking down artificial silos of maritime, urban, and environmental studies. Adopting the theme of ‘coastal imaginations’ embraces this journal’s aim of investigating the ‘hybridity between environments, people, activities and things, on and across the margins where water encounters land’. ³ Furthermore, in these two special issues we interpret the ‘coast’ as ‘messy, intermediate spaces’ that offer insights into liminality and a variety of cultural representations and encounters. By situating these volumes within a ‘coastal imaginaries’ sphere, we have encouraged authors to think innovatively and engage in methodological and thematic experimentation. The articles in this first special issue are grouped around the theme of Coastal Imaginaries: anxiety, liminality, power, and cultural Construction, while the second issue focuses on Coastal Imaginaries: haunted space, story and place.

The concept of coastal imaginaries shapes and informs the first edition’s five articles and highlight how these tangible geographical places were more than just physical locations. These coastal and waterfront spaces were actively imagined and infused with meanings that reflected the societal anxieties and cultural values of the time. Indeed, the chronology of the articles span from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and explore coastal imaginaries through a variety of mediums including archival material, newspapers, and film. Moreover, in exploring ‘coastal imaginaries’, certain themes recur in all five articles that help us understand the significance of how the coast was culturally constructed, disseminated and engaged with in different contexts and time periods.

A key theme that emerges in all five articles is how the coast became a space for the projection of anxieties. Saanika Patnaik’s article explores the East India Company’s operational anxieties as they engaged with settlements along the South Konkan coast. Located on the western edge of the Indian subcontinent, South Konkan was a politically contested space and the East India Company was anxious to promote a district idea of subjecthood to maintain political and economic control over the region. Brad Beaven examines how Victorian observers, anxious about the industrialisation of London and the environmental impact on maritime districts, began to imagine a degenerate urban-maritime culture that halted progress, and fostered pestilence and immorality. These fears and anxieties were projected on to the Thames and the working-class communities that populated the banks of the river. Jonathan Stafford’s article deals with how the coastal resort of Whitley in the north east of England was both a site of fun and fear in the age of mass leisure in the early twentieth century. While the new pleasure fun fairs had removed the environmental dangers of the sea, middle-class observers feared that the coast was becoming consumed by a popular culture devoid of taste and decorum. In his article on ‘Dark Myth and Trauma on the Coastline’, Mark Fryers argues that the coast was a site on which cultural myths about the Second World War were projected. However, he argues that these myths often conceal an underlying personal ‘coastal trauma’ for individuals that is lost in a ‘conservative and imperial discourse’ that emphasises the importance of nationhood and British exceptionalism. Finally, Hannah Willcox and Louise Curtis’, article on the German Baltic sea coast argues that the Christian Petzold’s films projected the anxieties and imaginations of the characters and viewers on to the Baltic coast. These issues included the climate crisis and Germany’s post-unification society.

Another key theme that underpins this issue’s contributions is that the coast was imagined as a liminal space. The two articles that feature the analysis of films particularly emphasises the ‘liminality of the coast’. Fryers explores liminality in the films The Great Escaper and The Last Rifleman as the coast is portrayed as existing as a boundary where complex cultural forces such as national identity and cultural myths are played out. The liminality of the coast is clearly present in Willcox and Curtis’ examination of Petzold’s films that portray the Baltic as a liminal ‘blank space’. In these films, the coast is removed from the character’s normal lives making it a space for encounters and negotiation. In Beaven’s article on the nineteenth century Thames, the very act of stepping foot on to a vessel and rowing out into a misty, dark and uncanny environment, unsettled observers and heightened their sensation of the river’s liminality to civilised London. In exploring the coastline of Bankot, Patnaik argues that borders were fluid, which provoked fears about regulation and sovereignty in the minds of those who managed the East India Company. Thus, the coast was cast in a political liminality, which ensured that coastal borders were ill-defined and constantly disputed. Finally, Stafford discusses how Whitley Bay was the site of a controlled ‘saturnalia’ of the fairground juxtaposed against the anxieties surrounding the ‘unruly surplus of energy’ of the working-class crowds at leisure. In this context, the coast is a liminal space where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and social control are negotiated and sometimes challenged.

In exploring coastal imaginaries, authors have also identified the theme of power and social control. The East India Company actively attempted to establish sovereignty over the South Konkan coast, which, as we have seen, was imprecise and fluid in terms of boundaries and subjecthood. Likewise, the social investigators of the Thames viewed their surroundings through an ‘imperial gothic’ lens that heightened their anxieties around social order and the control of urban spaces. The emerging mass leisure industry and its impact on the English coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also raised anxieties about the democratisation of leisure and concerns about controlling the mass of holidaymakers. In a similar vein, the development of Ostseebäder, or resort towns, on the Baltic coast in the nineteenth century, reproduced urban social structures through class and race demarcations evident on the beach. Meanwhile, the English beach that looked out on to the channel has become central to the mythmaking of the Second World War. The popular media has presented a powerful and dominant narrative of the British coast in ‘conservative and imperialist’ terms, which has shaped discussions around national identity, immigration and refugees.

Finally, with any discussion of coastal imaginaries, the importance of the relationship between perception and the lived reality is paramount. The English East India Company’s imagined sovereignty often clashed with the political discontent presented in the coastal region. The disorienting environment of the Thames led social investigators to project a malign urban-maritime culture on to working-class communities inhabiting the riverbank settlements. Likewise, bourgeois fears of uncivilised working-class behaviour and a degenerate mass leisure culture, far outstripped the realities of the actual impact of mass tourism in Whitley in the early twentieth century. Petzold’s films deliberately avoid the lived realities of the Baltic coast, preferring ‘blank’ liminality over typical tourist imagery. Finally, the personal ‘coastal trauma’ of those who experienced the lived reality of war, have been drowned out by the resurgence of nationalism that has valorised war veterans and celebrated patriotism.

In summary, these articles together portray coasts and waterways not as passive geographical landscapes, but as dynamic spaces that are actively shaped by human imagination. They are liminal spaces, where ideas and imaginations are projected, and where cultural encounters occur. Exploring the coast through the ‘coastal imaginary’ lens reveals contested power dynamics, myth-making, and moral panics over cultural transformations. When in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the sailor imagines a whispering coast, it triggers a range of confusing emotions. In exploring coastal imaginaries, we hope this lucid collection will aid the reader in untangling the cultural complexities of the coast and its portrayal in the popular imagination.