ABSTRACT
Whales have a long history of interaction with human coast-dwelling communities. As whales have continued to approach the same regions on the Atlantic and Pacific shores in the course of their long-distance oceanic pilgrimages, they have become sources of food and fuel, mythological and literary figures and, finally, symbols of human ruthlessness and ecological endangerment. Some recent creative works, notably Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider (1987, 2005), Niki Caro’s film adaptation Whale Rider (2002) and Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008), depict this complex web of human-cetacean relations, paying particular attention to indigenous coastal communities’ negotiations of tradition, economic viability and cultural regeneration predicated on their connection to whales. These encounters between humans and whales happen in what I will be calling ‘littoral space’: the interconnected terrestrial and maritime space on both sides of the shoreline. In the works under consideration here, littoral space includes various sites: the beach, the strip of land between – and close to – the tidelines, the human dwelling places nearby, the coastal waters including the fishing grounds, and the immediate hinterland. Such sites are not simply ‘there’: they are constituted both materially and symbolically through the interactions of the various human and non-human inhabitants of littoral space. In this essay, I look at the way encounters between humans and whales – specifically, whale strandings and the resumption of indigenous subsistence whaling – shape the conceptualisation of littoral space in postcolonial fiction and film.
