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Melody Jue. 2020. Wild Blue Media. Thinking through Seawater. Duke University Press, 240 

pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-0612-1  

Keywords: ocean, media, diving, cognitive estrangement, milieu-specific analysis 

If you have immersed yourself in underwater worlds through scuba diving, you will probably 

find that Luc Besson’s classic film Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, 1988) resonates with you, 

reconnecting you with that exhilarating feeling of otherness. In Le Grand Bleu free-divers dive 

deep on one breath of air. And in the more recent Netflix film, Sous Emprise (No Limit, 2022), 

a woman also enters this competitive sport, thus breaking the male dominance in cinematic 

representations of free-diving. Although free-diving relies on divers holding their breath, they 

also use various techniques and technologies to control their immersion. And if you want to 

stay under the surface for longer than a few minutes, you also need air supply. The deeper and 

longer you are submerged in the ocean, the more sophisticated the technology. As humans are 

increasingly exploiting and extracting marine resources, more advanced technologies are being 

developed. Driven by the greedy quest for profit, the infrastructure that enables commercial 

saturation diving is quite remarkable, as captured in the recent Netflix documentary Last Breath 

(2019). While the film shows the dangers of deep sea diving, it is silent on the devastating 

environmental effects of deep sea mining. Such anthropocentric portrayals of the ocean are by 

no means exceptional, but in the Anthropocene they become particularly problematic. I am 

reflecting on these films to situate this review in some media representations of diving, which 

bring out the risks and dangers involved, while evoking feelings of fear as well as fascination. 

These films also show the otherworldliness of human immersion in the ocean. Because humans 

cannot live underwater. We are terrestrial creatures.  

In Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue relocates theory building into the ocean, using seawater to 

think through some epistemic foundations in media and literary studies. Through her 

methodology of conceptual displacement, she theorizes milieu-specific analysis, emphasizing 

the importance of considering how the observer’s milieu influences his/her orientation to the 

world, along with culture, class, gender, race, ability, age etc. Thinking through seawater, Jue 

elucidates the terrestrial bias in media theory, not as something false or incorrect, but building 



on Donna Haraway, she shows that the terrestrial milieu constitutes a situated perspective, 

which can be quite different from knowledge situated in the ocean. “The milieu of the ocean 

offers an epistemological check on human knowledge formation, presenting entirely different 

conditions for perception, sensation, and life than terrestrial environments” (p. 11).  

Through oceanic immersion of some key concepts in media theory, Jue shows the difference 

that milieu-specific analysis brings to terrestrial-based theories. The three core chapters of the 

book are each devoted to one concept: interface, inscription and database. This is followed by 

a chapter on underwater museums, which also summarises the main arguments. The chapters 

draw on close readings of texts and visual analysis, combined with scholarly engagements with 

theoretical work from a wide range of disciplines, as carefully explained in the introductory 

chapter that conscientiously situates the author and the book. 

For instance, in Chapter One, Jue takes breathing underwater as an analytical key for a 

phenomenological reading of the interface. While interface is typically thought of as a physical 

thing (computer screen, game console) in media studies, emphasising surfaces of interactive 

visual iconography, Jue starts with the human lung in scuba diving, extending her analysis to 

critical bodily experiences underwater, from pressure and proprioception, to nitrogen narcosis 

and tissue saturation. The analysis draws on the work of Jacques Cousteau, including his 

development of the aqualung, which he reflected on in terms of “our flesh feeling what the fish 

scales know,” thus formulating a sensuous epistemic (p. 45).  

After discussing interface in the context of media studies, Jue turns to literary theory, and the 

spatial metaphors of surface reading and depth. Here she uses the writings of Dr Sylvia Earle, 

a world-renowned oceanographer and ocean advocate. In Jue’s analysis, Earle’s experiences 

highlight gendered differences in the predominantly male world of early ocean explorers, while 

nuancing oceanic epistemics. In the Tektite II project in 1970, Earle led the first all-female team 

of aquanauts. The underwater Tektite habitat enabled them to spend much more time diving, 

since they did not need to worry about pressure and decompression. Earle’s reflections on 

saturation diving in terms of having an extended passport into an alien world is extended to an 

analysis of differences between land and sea. Jue uses the media concept of excommunication 

to describe what she calls an ontological condition of amphibiousness: “In diving, the human 

is excommunicated from the surface world the longer they reside at depth” (p. 63). She 

elaborates on the human-as-alien in the ocean in terms of liminality “the human figure is the 

liminal trespasser that can only temporarily belong to the ocean” (p. 64). To Earle, this sense 

of unbelonging instilled an epistemic humility that inspired her lifelong care for the oceanic 



other, her deep insights of ocean life compelling her to share her knowledge and protect the 

ocean, as depicted in the Netflix documentary Mission Blue (2014). 

Melody Jue argues for diving as a humanities methodology, and throughout the text, the reader 

is exposed to the ocean, through imaginary or literary diving. Whether through the words and 

images of early explorers such as Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, or Jue’s recollections of 

her own diving experiences, from her initial reflections when learning to dive in North Carolina 

to her epistemic insights when diving in Jason deClaire Taylor’s Underwater Museum in 

Mexico, Jue brings the reader into the ocean. In her concluding chapter, Jue elaborates on diving 

as a method of cognitive estrangement, arguing that diving makes visible terrestrial biases in 

theory making, offers a means of witnessing environmental change, and can function as an 

ethnographic practice. The methodological advantages of scuba diving are evident in emerging 

anthropological scholarship, as exemplified by current work on trash diving in Stockholm 

(Rodineliussen 2021). If anything, Jue’s sophisticated theorizing on diving as a method of 

cognitive estrangement and conceptual displacement should inspire more scholars to immerse 

themselves in the ocean. 

For anthropologists, the book’s subtitle Thinking through Seawater recalls Stefan Helmreich’s 

pathbreaking work on seawater as a theory machine (2011). In this foundational text, Helmreich 

advances theorizing of the ocean well beyond the nature/culture divide, concluding that 
“[s]eawater is both good to think with and here to live with, in multifarious actuality” (2011, 138). 

Melody Jue’s interdisciplinary approach builds on Helmreich’s work and he is acknowledged 

for having “generously read every inch of my writings about the ocean” (p. xiii). Indeed, her 

engagements with anthropological work, including Haraway, Helmreich, and Ingold, along 

with other disciplines, from ocean humanities to STS, make Jue’s scholarly efforts stand out, 

an impressively interdisciplinary work that is of great value across various disciplines.    

Jue’s sophisticated theorizing is combined with an ethical commitment to care for the ocean, 

and she refers to Wild Blue Media as a pre-activist book. Written at a time of climate change 

and environmental crisis, she draws on critical scholarship to underline the urgency of thinking 

through seawater. Jue’s book will hopefully inspire scholars and activists to immerse 

themselves into underwater worlds, and show people above the surface what a wonderful world 

of many worlds our pluriversal blue planet is. Water is Life. 

 

 



References 

Helmreich, Stefan. “Nature/Culture/Seawater.” American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (2011): 

132-144.  

Rodineliussen, Rasmus. “Caring for Water: Underwater Waste, Trash Diving, and Publicity in 

Stockholm.” kritisk etnografi - Swedish Journal of Anthropology 4 no. 2 (2021): 67-81. 

Films cited 

Besson, Luc. 1988. Le Grand Bleu.  

da Costa, R., and Parkinson, A. 2019. Last Breath.  

Nixon, R., and Stevens, F. 2014. Mission Blue. 

Rosenthal, D. M. 2022. Sous Emprise.  

 

Paula Uimonen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She is 
specialized in digital anthropology as well as the anthropology of art, visual culture, world 
literature, ocean and water. Her current research project Swahili Ocean Worlds explores 
environmental and social sustainability in fishing communities in Tanzania, through multi-
sited and multisensory fieldwork. This collaborative research project is carried out with 
researchers from University of Dar es Salaam and funded by the Swedish Research Council 
(2022-2024). Paula’s recent open access publications include the article “Spiritual 
Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds” (2021, special issue on water in kritisk etnografi), the 
monograph Invoking Flora Nwapa. Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in 
World Literature (2020, Stockholm University Press), and the book chapter “One World 
Literature with Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa”, in Claiming Space. Locations and 
Orientations in World Literatures (2021, Bloomsbury Academic).  

 

 

© 2022 Paula Uimonen  

 

 


