Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life

Joint Projects

Oceanic Imaginations: Fluid Histories and Mobile Cultures

Mana Kia (MESAAS) and Debashree Mukherjee (MESAAS).

Things look different when viewed from the ocean. Categories such as territory, nation, and region can feel less certain, while embodiment, faith, and emotion can become more immediate. Our thematic – of oceanic imaginations – is designed to explore the theoretical, methodological, and material insights to be gained from an oceanic perspective on culture, religion, and the practices of everyday life. Oceans have for long been understood as conduits of movement linking different land masses and peoples together. As connective zones, oceans push us to break out of the siloes of area studies and think more expansively past the transnational. And thus, we know that the circulation of people, texts, goods, practices, and ideas have thick and deep histories across Africa and Asia. However, beyond economically determined factors, what are the constituting elements of these networks of circulation? Moreover, can we think the ocean not only as a space that connects to other places but as a watery, vital place with its own material specificities? In recent years there has been a shift away from a focus on mobility and economic history, towards cultural and interdisciplinary studies that take the "ocean-ness" of oceans seriously. Much of this work, tentatively termed “critical ocean studies,” is a response to the epistemic provocations of the Anthropocene. We propose to link the insights of an earlier model of oceanic studies that broke new ground in studies of race, colonialism, and material culture, with emerging interests that seek to revitalize our assumptions about the environment, aesthetics, and belief systems. As scholars committed to transregional, anti-imperial, and feminist historiography, the ocean is a particularly rich analytic to think with, as well as a mobile and material place to think from.

 

Events

Featured
Oceanic Workshop Flyer.jpg
May 6
Oceanic Imaginations: Fluid Histories, Mobile Cultures

A workshop organized by Mana Kia and Debashree Mukherjee (MESAAS, Columbia University).

Things look different when viewed from the ocean. Categories such as territory, nation, and region can feel less certain, while embodiment, faith, and emotion can become more immediate. Our thematic – of oceanic imaginations – is designed to explore the theoretical, methodological, and material insights to be gained from an oceanic perspective on culture, religion, and the practices of everyday life. Oceans have for long been understood as conduits of movement linking different land masses and peoples together. As connective zones, oceans push us to break out of the siloes of area studies and think more expansively past the transnational. And thus, we know that the circulation of people, texts, goods, practices, and ideas have thick and deep histories across Africa and Asia. However, beyond economically determined factors, what are the constituting elements of these networks of circulation? Moreover, can we think the ocean not only as a space that connects to other places but as a watery, vital place with its own material specificities? In recent years there has been a shift away from a focus on mobility and economic history, towards cultural and interdisciplinary studies that take the "ocean-ness" of oceans seriously. Much of this work, tentatively termed “critical ocean studies,” is a response to the epistemic provocations of the Anthropocene. We propose to link the insights of an earlier model of oceanic studies that broke new ground in studies of race, colonialism, and material culture, with emerging interests that seek to revitalize our assumptions about the environment, aesthetics, and belief systems. As scholars committed to transregional, anti-imperial, and feminist historiography, the ocean is a particularly rich analytic to think with, as well as a mobile and material place to think from.

Shame and Resistance.jpg
Feb 12
Shame and Resistance in the Post-Colony: Plantation Legacies and Racial Hierarchies in the Mascarene Islands

A lecture by artist Shiraz Bayjoo.

The Indian Ocean region, home to the multiple crossovers of Africa and Asia, would eventually shape European ambitions of Empire. Through colonization its sea routes and boundaries would be re-drawn from the movement of spice and silks to include the burgeoning demand for flesh and labour. It is at these sites of intense production that the plantation colonies of the Mascarene Islands were born. Previously uninhabited and strategically positioned, Mauritius was established early on as a slave colony. First settled by the Dutch, it was under French rule that the islands sugar plantations expanded, and ruled by the ‘Code Noir’ it would become known as the Maroon republic. Under the abolition of slavery, the island would later serve as the site for the ‘Great Experiment’, as the British replaced the demand for labour on its plantations with the Indenture labor system. This presentation will explore how racial hierarchies persist through reductionist narratives, exposing the enduring legacies of the Plantocracy. Through his on going practice and research focus, Shiraz Bayjoo unpacks how Mauritius’s Kreol identity is formed of Afro-Indo origins, and it is here through defiance from slave uprisings and escape into maroon communities where narratives of resistance and resilience begin to create new pathways of de-colonisation.

Of Sky, Water and Skin: Photographs from a Zanzibari Darkroom
Oct 30
Of Sky, Water and Skin: Photographs from a Zanzibari Darkroom

A lecture by Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand).

For this paper, Gupta proposes to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930-present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907-1993), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950-). She employs a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images. First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, she is taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense (Hayes 2017) and exposing it for interpretation. Second, she focuses her lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction (Jansen 2018). Third, Gupta develops darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698-1964) and British Protectorate (1890-1963). Fourth, she conceptualizes the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout her analysis, Gupta uses a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness.

A.Y. 2020-21Guest User