Imagined Tides: A Comparative Study of the Aquatic Monstrous in Francophone and Hispanophone Cultures

This project will compare depictions of marine monsters in French- and Spanish-speaking literature and audiovisual culture since the beginning of transatlantic colonisation, focusing on changing attitudes towards the sea and its associations with colonial others. By placing diverse cultural productions in conversation with each other and examining them as a transnational, transatlantic imaginary, this thesis will offer a literary history of francophone and hispanophone relations with the sea as charted through their monsters, positing that there has been a cultural turn from representing the sea as a dangerous unknown to appreciating it as a romantic locale or resource to be exploited, but this turn has been neither linear nor straightforward.

My project will address this gap by building on current work examining monstrosity and colonialism (e.g. Braham 2015) to analyse the aquapelagic imaginaries of France, Spain and their Atlantic coastal colonies as comparable cultural contexts: colonial powers tied to both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. My analysis will use an original combination of monster theory, which proposes monsters as sites of cultural construction (Cohen 1996), and

Kamau Braithwaite's postcolonial concept of tidalectics (Braithwaite 1999), which envisions cross-cultural flows across oceanic spaces reflecting the movement of the ocean itself. I will expand these theories by employing them jointly, together with Hayward's aquapelagic imaginary and the emerging discourse of hydrohumanities, which draws on interdisciplinary research to explore how humanities-led awareness of "human-water-power relationships'' (De Wolff and Faletti 2022) can inform solutions to climate change and rising sea levels.

My study will be guided by three key questions: 1. How do representations of sea monsters compare between francophone and hispanophone cultures? 2. To what extent do these monstrous narratives reflect cultural anxieties about the ocean and the other? 3. How have these anxieties and monsters changed from the beginning of transatlantic colonisation to the

present day?

I will use textual and thematic analysis of cultural productions focused on marine monsters, such as literature, journalistic accounts and film. Possible sources to illustrate scope include: the diaries of Christopher Columbus (c. 1492), Natural History, or the Strange West Indies by French naturalist Louis Nicolas (c. 1675), Spanish essayist Benito Feijóo's Universal Critical Theater (1726-39), Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866), and films such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) which situate their aquatic monstrosities in Latin American contexts.

The aim of this diverse corpus is to compile a comprehensive analytical history that draws new comparisons across cultural works from the fifteenth century up to the present, exploring and articulating ways in which popular culture and erudite sources in French and Spanish have interacted with each other, introduced new monstrous discourses and reappropriated old ones.

In doing so, this project will provide an original contribution to monster studies and hydrohumanities that opens the discussion for further interdisciplinary works that examine human-water relations.