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

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.