Oct 21. 12pm. [Zoom Meeting] Dilip Menon, Renisa Mawani, and Isabel Hofmeyr. “Oceanic Methodologies: A Conversation.” Based on the recent anthology, Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime, edited by Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie (Routledge, India, April 2022) — here are page proofs — this panel will focus on Chapter One, Dilip Menon, “Oceanic Histories: from the Terrestrial to the Maritime,” to explore its argument that the ocean presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and social sciences in our fraught era of global warming and climate uncertainty. The panel will consider how such an ocean-centric approach might offer new perspectives and engagements challenging long-standing paradigms of world history and environmental studies. Dilip will open the conversation; Renisa and Isabel will respond; and Sudipta Sen and May Joseph will moderate. (This meeting launches our Port City Environments project, Anthropocene Ecologies, and Climate Futures)

RECORDING: Speaker View. Gallery View.

Dilip Menon is Professor of History, Department of International Relations and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand. Dilip does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. He works on oceanic histories and knowledge from the global south. His current project is on thinking about historical imagination in South Asia. His recent book is Introduction to Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a global history of capitalisms from the 10th to the 18th century covering themes like silver, slavery and a geography extending from China, India and SE Asia to the Ottoman, Safavid and Russian empires. 

Renisa Mawani is Associate Professor of Sociology and Founding Chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia. She works on the conjoined histories of Indigeneity, Asian migration, and settler colonialism and has published widely on law and coloniality and legal geography. Her research coalesces at the juncture of critical theory and British colonial legal history. Her research interests include historical/comparative sociologies of empire, sociologies of modernity, law and nature, postcolonial theory, biopolitics and racisms, cosmopolitanism, affect, law and society in South Asia. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009), Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), and a series of articles, which have been published in Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and elsewhere.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Her most recent book is Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022). Over the last two decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the world. With Charne Lavery, she runs a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados.

May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theatre and professor of social science at Pratt Institute, and author of the books Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2022); Ghosts of Lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (Routledge, 2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joseph is also co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022) and of Performing Hybridity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Additional work by Joseph can be found at: www.mayjoseph.com

Sudipta Sen is professor of history and Middle East/South Asia studies, University of California, Davis. A scholar of Late Mughal and British India, British Empire, and Environment and Ecology, his early work has focused on the history of British expansion in India. He is author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002); Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the Routledge Ocean and Island Studies book series. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Award (2021-23), he was recently (2021) presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.

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