2025/09/25 by Michael Fuchs · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Maritime Security and History
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14788810.2025.2559529
openalex publication_date 2025/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
This study examines how contemporary representations of bull sharks reflect cultural anxieties about the permeability of environmental boundaries. Focusing on three popular media texts – Joseph Monninger’s middle-grade fiction Dragged from Under: The Bull Shark (2020), the made-for-television horror film Red Water (2003), and the videogame Maneater (2020) – the article argues that the bull shark functions as a symbolic agent of disruption, unsettling distinctions between land and sea, safety and danger, human and nonhuman domains. These texts use the bull shark’s ability to navigate both salt- and freshwater terrains to dramatize the consequences of extraction, pollution, and infrastructural collapse. While differing in tone, medium, genre, and target audience, they collectively frame the Atlantic as a volatile system overflowing its bounds, deploying the inland shark as a symbol for environmental reckoning in an era of climate crisis and species displacement.