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.



Coral and coralations with Melody Jue and Ann Elias

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Coral and coralations with Melody Jue and Ann Elias

University of Minnesota Press

Related tracks