To Catch a Fish in 21st century contemporary culture is pretty easy, as mermaids are everywhere these days. From literature to film, art to advertising, mermaid museums to mermaid conferences (mercons), mermaids are surfacing and demanding attention. Today’s mermaids defy expectations of alabaster skin and blond hair, Christian ideals of female sexuality, and other genre conventions solidified in the wake of Hans Christen Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837) and Disney’s famous animated adaptation of it (1989). Today’s mermaids are Black and Brown, sexually fluid, and grounded in indigeneity. They rage against human destruction of the oceans and global capitalism but are also very much part of the contemporary culture industry— from mermaid kitsch to “MermaidCore” fashion.
Hosted by Dr. Jessica Pressman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and mermaid scholar, this talk considers what we can learn by taking seriously the contemporary mermaid renaissance, catching a fish or two and carefully examining these examples as a means of understanding the larger current. What might mermaids—from contemporary culture AND Mingei's exhibition—tell us about culture’s most pressing anxieties and concerns, past and present?
Jessica Pressman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, where she co-founded SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative. She is the author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2020), Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-author,_ with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (University of Iowa Press, 2015). She co-edited two volumes: Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) with N. Katherine Hayles and Book Presence in a Digital Age_ (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) with Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and Kári Driscoll. She is at work on a book about 21st-century mermaid narrative. Her full CV can be found at www.jessicapressman.com.
Image credit: Rosendo Rodriguez, Mermaid, 20th century, Mexico. Painted clay. 10 1/2 in. x 14 in. x 5 in. Gift of Mayde Meiers Herberg, 1999-02-002.