The New York Center for Global Asia presents: “Oceanic Methodologies: A Conversation” on Friday, October 21 at 12:00 pm EST.
This conversation will be 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). This panel will focus on Chapter One, Dilip Menon’s “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 the Center’s Port City Environments project: “Anthropocene Ecologies, Climate Futures.”
To register, please use this registration link.
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.
