Thinking at Sea Level with Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

Esther Pujolràs-Noguer’s research seminar “Thinking at Sea Level: The Whale as a Literary Trope to Re-conceptualize the ‘Human’” took place on the 20^th of March 2025. Pujolràs-Noguer, who is an associate professor at the University of Lleida, visited the University of Pretoria as part of the research project Aquatic Imaginaries: Re-charting Indoceanic and Atlantic Literary Productions (INDAOC).

Her paper compared two short stories with one another while being attentive to their thalassentric (sea-centred) aesthetics. Mercè Rodoreda’s Catalan short story “My Christina” (1967) has its male protagonist return to land after a period of exile he spent violently trying to escape a whale’s belly. During those years in the ocean, he underwent a corporeal transformation that enabled different ways of seeing – ways of seeing Pujolràs-Noguer reads as an opening towards what Mignolo (2009) terms “epistemic disobedience. The protagonist, however, does not embrace this possibility and is uneasily reclaimed by terrestrial society. Epistemic disobedience is practised more fully in Vandana Singh’s short story “Mother Ocean” (2019) by finding comfort in the dissolution of boundaries underwater. Here the female protagonist does not fight the whale but is part of a decentred scientific effort to establish communication with whales. In both short stories Paul Gilroy’s offshore humanism, including its directive to think at sea level is – quite literally – deepened.

The discussion emphasised what rich literary tropes whales and the sea are. Diverse texts story, for example, how storms at sea can trigger mutinies, how water as a medium of transformation can break down gender binaries, or how communication with whales can give access to knowledge threatened by epistemicide.