Paper short abstract:

St Helena’s airport generated nostalgia for a disappearing maritime past. This paper engages the island’s history as “ocean roadhouse” and place of exile and as both “cut off” and “deeply connected” since its inception as a place of settlement to facilitate English imperial interests in the East

Paper long abstract:

My paper draws from a larger project on an anthropology of the sea. While efforts at “thinking with the sea” work against bounded and static conceptions of place and space I choose to focus on the South Atlantic World with the Island of St Helena as its core. In contrast to the Atlantic’s north, the Indian Ocean Basin or the Pacific’s “sea of island”, the South Atlantic is often imagined as the wide watery unmarked space in which the island is “cut off” by the sea. A different imaginary emerges when we consider the historic oceanic networks that met at and cross-cut St Helena, that is the island as connected by the sea. Trevor Hearl, the noted historian of St Helena, likened the North Atlantic to a series of parallel clothes lines running East-West linking the two Atlantic seaboards, Europe, Africa and North America. He contrasts this imaginary with the South Atlantic and a vision of St Helena at the center of a spider’s web whose webs reach far and wide linking East, West, North and South in the mid-South Atlantic. The island, its people and the landscape itself, through its maritime history was at the nexus of these global journeys and voyages. It was made from, and is constituted by a maritime history of movements and flows.