New Online Series - Heated Conversations | Killian Quigley

You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series

Heated Conversations

Killian Quigley will speak on Elephants on the Seafloor: Imperial Tusks, Oceanic Rearticulations

Click here for paper

In 1656, the Dutch East Indiaman Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) wrecked on a reef off Yued country, today known in the terms of settler-colonial naming, as proximate to the Moore River Region of Western Australia. The abundant detritus rescued from the wreckage included the “artefact” pictured here, an elephant tusk archived, in the Shipwreck Databases of the Western Australian Museum, as item “GT691 – Animal.”  

 This paper-in-progress responds to the salvaged tusk as an incitement to think the intersections of empires, animalities, and oceanities from the submersed lives and times of elephantine ruins. Drawing on critical ocean studies, multispecies methods, and marine materialisms, I ask what a submarine humanities can offer in contact with a commoditized and imperialized body that appears at once co-constituted by and radically alien to submarine space. 

Killian Quigley is a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences; an honorary postdoctoral fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute; and an associate member of Oceanic Humanities for the Global South. He is author of Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (2023) and co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea.

Wednesday, 26^th April 2023
10 am
Register here:
https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrfuCuqjkiGdOMGJQ29A2S4ayAfydhkPUq

Heated Conversations  is a new seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall

        As global warming produces rising seas, falling dam levels and excessive droughts, generating new levels of multi-crisis in the world-now, so too are our conversations and discourses heating up in multiple ways. This seminar series takes up these questions of anthropogenic escalation and pedagogical shifts of gear. It does so in a context in which strengthening Southern bodies of knowledge is ever more crucial to engaging collectively with and comprehending these complex new rubrics and material dimensions. A forum broadly dedicated to the literary and cultural humanities, the seminar is hospitably open to wide participation from as many parts of the world as possible and will invite speakers to offer generative interventions for discussion and debate.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.