“Ivory Archives and Temporalities at Sea”

As it changed hands between US-based whalers, China trade merchants, and Indigenous Fijians, whale bone became a kind of archive-one on which whalemen logged their voyages and through which Indigenous people marked important social and political events. To call ivory an archive is not to say that temporality meant the same thing for everyone who encountered it. Timekeeping was a contested issue, particularly as imperial powers worked to standardize time zones and date lines-a project motivated by maritime navigation and its clock-based technologies, which native people across Oceania resisted. Temporality was thus a matter of both colonial control and of native sovereignty. By examining Western and Indigenous ideas of time as well as the non-human time of whales, this essay shows how whale ivory can help us understand maritime encounters between cultures and across species.

Maggie Cao is a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art in a global context. She studies the history of globalization with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics. Her first book, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2018) examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States and argues that landscape is the genre through which American artists most urgently sought to come to terms with modernity. Cao has also written on media theory, material culture, and ecocriticism. Among her publications are essays on the print culture of the earliest worldwide financial bubbles and the materiality of export art made in eighteenth-century China. Her new book Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies (Chicago University Press, 2025) is the first synthetic treatment of nineteenth-century art and empire in the global context.