Despite the recognition of human reliance on the World Ocean as a biogeophysical unit, we continue to live in a world of oceanic fragments carrying legacies of past and present imperial processes. This online conference on Post-Imperial Oceans links questions concerning imperial processes across the oceans of the world, and the world ocean as a whole. Historians and geographers have sought to think across the historiographies of ocean worlds in productive ways, and Anthropology was in important ways invented in the late-colonial oceans, entangled with the transformations of island societies. At the edges of the humanities, literary and cultural studies, and the inter-disciplines of Global Black Studies, and Pacific Island and Oceania studies have fundamentally revised our sense of oceanic archives, including the archives of the dispossessed. More recently, the Environmental Humanities stretch our habits of thought to the materiality of imperial remains. While the crescendo of environmental and imperial crises in our time have often looked to islands, littorals and oceans as places for reaching beyond the death cult of capital, or of awakening to the severity of our present, our critical imaginations rarely delve below the waterline. This conference brings together a set of thinkers engaged with fragmented, layered and linked oceanic imperial processes, to think with the creative tensions between sociocultural processes across oceanic surfaces, and the mysteries of the submarine.
We ask a set of scholars to think with the tensions between the surface and the submarine, through their specific concerns, about post-imperial oceanics today.
Conference organized by:
Sharad Chari (Department of Geography, Berkeley),
Charne Lavery (Oceanic Humanities in the Global South, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand),
Isabel Hofmeyr (Oceanic Humanities in the Global South, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand).
Keynote lecture
(Live on Nov 4, 2020 @ 9am PST):
Laleh Khalili (Queen Mary, University of London)
Confirmed speakers
(Live panels on Nov 4, 2020 @ 10am and Nov 5, 2020 @ 9am PST. 10 minute pre-recorded micro-lectures posted from Oct 30 HERE):
Rosanna Carver (UBC Vancouver)
Charmaine Chua (Santa Barbara)
Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA)
David Featherstone (Glasgow)
Jennifer Gaynor (Buffalo)
Pamila Gupta (Wits)
Jaimey Hamilton-Faris (Hawaii)
Melody Jue (Santa Barbara)
Jeffrey Kahn (Davis)
Renisa Mawani (UBC Vancouver)
Laurel Mei-Singh (Hawaii)
Ben Mendelsohn (Penn)
Mae Miller (Berkeley)
Killian Quigley (Sydney)
Meg Samuelson (Adelaide)
Matt Shutzer (Berkeley)
Other speakers to be announced.
_________________
DATE: Wed, Nov 4 - Thu, Nov 5, 2020
TIME: 7am Honolulu | 9am Berkeley, Vancouver | 12pm Buffalo | 5pm London, Glasgow | 7pm Johannesburg | 10:30pm Cochin | 4am Sidney | Calculate Your Local Time
This event will also be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
_________________
Image credit:
"Ellen Gallagher" by C-Monster is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
_________________
Like us on FACEBOOK
Follow us on TWITTER
The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
