The Contemporary Mermaid Renaissance: History, Consciousness, and Survival

Pressman, Jessica; Pressman, Jessica

From the Netflix special about professional mermaids, MerPeople (2023); to the spate of contemporary mermaid horror films, including Killer Mermaid (2014), The Lure (2017), The Mermaid—Lake of the Dead (2018) among others; to an untold number of novels and poetry collections, mermaids, simbi, water spirits, and other aquatic beings are resurfacing and proliferating in our contemporary moment. Scholars have begun to take note. From Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown’s edited collection The Penguin Book of Mermaids (2019) to Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople: A Human History (2020), to Jessica Pressman’s edited collection “Our Mermaid Craze” (2024) for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, new scholarly debates about half aquatic and half human beings have opened up. The “Mermaid Renaissance”—understood as a contemporary resurgence and proliferation of mermaid narratives across transnational waters—frames this panel, which brings into dialogue works from Jamaica, Italy, Denmark, and the United States. We focus on the way these mermaid narratives—oral, written, visual, and/or performed—engage and represent important ontological and historical questions in our contemporary moment about both the human and the non-human and their relation to each other. We are particularly interested in investigating the way mermaid narratives today examine and reflect on questions of racialized and gendered oppression, but also imaginative possibilities about emancipatory futures.

We have 4 papers, and each paper will be 12 minutes long. That will leave at least 5 minutes for introductions and 22 minutes for questions.

We are a diverse group of scholars brought together by our interest in mermaids, simbi, and water spirits. We have very different expertise: in African disaspora literatures and culture; in nineteenth-century American literatures and culture; in folklore and fairy-tale studies; in the digital humanities and comparative literature. We also teach in a range of departments: Africana Studies, American Studies, Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and English. Finally, we come from a range of public institutions on the East and West coast of the US, as well as England. We look forward, therefore, to a topically and methodologically diverse discussion and debate about mermaids in contemporary culture.

Catherine John’s “Mermaids in Jamaica: Afroindigenized Lore as Submerged Consciousness” shares oral stories told to the author, scholarly assessments of water spirit beliefs in rural Jamaica and its intersection with Taino and enslaved African knowledge systems in order to address a kind of submerged consciousness in Caribbean spaces and places. Arguing that these mermaid stories function as repressed forms of functional knowledge rather than mere folktale, John aims to raise questions about the lore and lure, while pondering the purpose of these entities in a modern moment. Francesca Sawaya’s “Revising Disney; Rethinking Ballet: John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid” focuses on the choreographer John Neumeier’s enraged response to Disney’s popular 1989 film in a full-length 2005 ballet. Sawaya demonstrates the ways in which Neumeier criticizes Disney’s assimilationist and heteronormative version of Andersen’s fairy tale through the use of Andersen’s biography, as well as histories of the closet and of disability. Equally important, Neumeier helps us rethink the normative features of both Andersen and Disney’s narratives through experimental costumes and contemporary queer club dance forms. Elena Sottilotta’s “Merfolk Narratives in Southern Italian Waters: Cola Pesce, Parthenope and the Mythical Sea” examines the persistence and transformation of merfolk traditions in southern Italy: the legendary Cola Pesce and the siren Parthenope. Both Cola Pesce and Parthenope emerge from mythical traditions in which the sea marks a threshold between human and more-than-human forms of existence. Contemporary narratives and urban visual art that relies on these figures invite reflection on the precarious position of human life in relation to the mysterious forces associated with the sea. Jessica Pressman’s “Becoming Mermaids: Contemporary Mermaid Stories as Survival Strategies” demonstrates that from YA fiction to horror, from children’s literature to queer romance, mermaid narratives position hybridity as survival strategy in the digitally networked, techno-capitalist context of the Anthropocene. Pressman demonstrates how mermaid stories serve queer, trans, crip, feminist, and posthuman becoming. Pressman argues that mermaid fiction today is a survival guide for living in the contemporary world. With these four different papers we hope to suggest some of the ways mermaid narratives engage difficult histories and contemporary challenges while also imagining and working towards better futures.

709 The Contemporary Mermaid Renaissance: History, Consciousness, and Survival: Calls for Papers