Out of the Blue, into the Black: Representing, Imagining, and Researching Port Cities

Abstract

Port cities lie at the edge between black and blue. For centuries, writers have described port cities as exotic places of cosmopolitanism and vibrant cultural exchange, connected to the ‘blue’ of sea, sky, and dreams. Port cities are surrounded by blue, the blue of water lapping at shores, extending out into distant horizons. They are filled with the blue of longing, of imagining possibilities out at sea and in different lands. But port cities are also represented as ‘black’ places of crime, violence, poverty, and social exclusion, classic settings for gritty noir literature and film. In this chapter, I argue that the themes of blue and black capture ambivalent and contradictory representations of urban identity in port cities, and that these representations provide methodological insights for researching port cities.

The title is a reference to the song ‘Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Blue)’ by Neil Young, from the 1979 album Rust Never Fades. The song uses dichotomies of black and blue to address questions of life and death, permanence and impermanence, the wider meaning of art and culture, and the significance of individual and collective human legacies:

My my, hey hey Rock and roll is here to stay It’s better to burn out Than to fade away My my, hey hey. Out of the blue and into the black They give you this, but you pay for that And once you’re gone, you can never come back When you’re out of the blue and into the black…