Indian Ocean Energies

WiSER and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) invite you to

INDIAN OCEAN ENERGIES

The Indian Ocean has been a vital arena of historical and literary exploration, of forced labour, Islam, anticolonialism and the Cold War.  In our time of shifting certainties about the centre of gravity of global capitalism, US-centric geopolitics, and Northern expert knowledge and cultural production, the Indian Ocean resurfaces as an arena of South-South exchange and creative possibility.  We turn to these contemporary and emergent practices and circulations to ask what set of tools, questions, and approaches might be adequate to an Indian Ocean Studies of the present and future. Will the Indian Ocean be the locus of a distinctively 'Southern' capitalism in which various classes released from national capitalisms take on new incarnations? Will we find Afro-Asian material processes intent on more than bleeding African resources into oceanic conduits? Will we find new forms of geopolitics and counter-insurgency? As the sea over which most oil is carried, will it become the strategic battleground for carbon resources, or the site of new exchanges of post-carbon technologies? While drawing from established work, these questions draw the field away from older traditions of historical and cultural studies of the monsoon ocean. 'Indian Ocean Energies' thinks with the emergent, speaking to contemporary issues and potential futures, and also to forms of writing premised less on historical depth than on the facility of circulation. ‘Energies’ provides a material and metaphorical device to think kinetically and oceanically, through the movement of people, objects, capital and socio-cultural forms, through, above, below and beside the water. 

23^rd July – 25^th July 2015
WiSER Seminar room 

Funded by the Indian Government’s Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs, with additional support from funding from the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and WiSER.