Since the demise of the maritime economy in the mid 20th century, there have been many attempts in which maritime tradition has been aesthetically reinvented and culturally reinterpreted in the Gulf. These attempts have mainly coincided with the rise of the modern nation state and building cultural capital. However, local practitioners and historians involved in maritime life have constantly expressed their apprehension towards any form of appropriation or subsumption of their local understanding of their history into the different modernist discourses or cultural forms. The paper will examine two seminal cultural works that offer a contested understanding of the history of the maritime tradition. The first case is the first Kuwaiti feature film titled Bas Ya Bahar (The Cruel Sea) (1971) directed by Khaled Al-Siddiq, which presents the pearling tradition within a general leftist perspective as a history of capitalistic exploitation. The second case is Muhammad al-Fayez’s epic poem Muthakarat Bahhar (Memoirs of a Seafarer) (1964), which aimed to translate the vernacular pearl-diving poetry to the register of Fus-ha Arabic within a modernist Pan-Arab outlook. The paper will present a critical analysis of these attempts and their reception to highlight the tensions between the vernacular specificities of the maritime tradition and the modernist reinterpretations of it. Understanding these contested representations of maritime culture allows for a more nuanced understanding of the identity shifts in the Gulf from a maritime vernacular deeply rooted in the Western Indian Ocean culture to a purist Pan-Arab identity. More recently, the Gulf has seen a significant shift away from an Arab nationalist persuasion to more localized and regional notions of national identity. Contemporary attempts at gaining cultural capital in the Gulf aspire to situate the region within a more global context by representing culture in the register of Global English. In all these shifts, maritime culture continues to be culturally reinvented in accordance with the different shifts in Gulf identity.