Dec 2. 10:00-12:00. [Zoom Meeting] A discussion of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia, featuring essays by Rohan D’Souza, May Joseph and Sudipta Sen. This book is a part of a new Routledge series, Ocean and Island Studies. It is a collection of essays focused on coasts, islands, and shorelines, written by historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists. It advances our understanding of the lesser-studied lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Invoking a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water―deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats―Terra Aqua aims at a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. It explores threatened lives, endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against the backdrop of rising seas and the climatic upheavals, with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. It examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the erosion of littoral lives, livelihoods and habitats. This is a book for all students and scholars of the environment who are interested in the changing coastal ecologies and environments of Asia.
RECORDING
Rohan D’Souza is professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2006). His research interests include themes on environmental history and modern technology, such as hydraulic transition, modernity, colonialism, and rivers. D’Souza’s research discipline encompasses social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, and humanities and the social sciences.
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 presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.