Isas Departmental's video: Post-Imperial Oceanics Sharad Chari

November 4 – 5, 2020 Welcome Remarks by Prof. Shard Chari Despite the recognition of human reliance on the World Ocean as a biogeophysical unit, we continue to live in a world of oceanic fragments carrying legacies of past and present imperial processes. This online conference on ‘Post-Imperial Oceans’ links questions concerning imperial processes across the oceans of the world, and the world ocean as a whole. Historians and geographers have sought to think across the historiographies of ‘ocean worlds’ in productive ways, and Anthropology was in important ways invented in the late-colonial oceans, entangled with the transformations of island societies. At the edges of the humanities, literary and cultural studies, and the inter-disciplines of Global Black Studies, and Pacific Island and Oceania studies have fundamentally revised our sense of oceanic archives, including the archives of the dispossessed. More recently, the Environmental Humanities stretch our habits of thought to the materiality of imperial remains. While the crescendo of environmental and imperial crises in our time have often looked to islands, littorals and oceans as places for reaching beyond the death cult of capital, or of awakening to the severity of our present, our critical imaginations rarely delve below the waterline. This conference brings together a set of thinkers engaged with fragmented, layered and linked oceanic imperial processes, to think with the creative tensions between sociocultural processes across oceanic surfaces, and the mysteries of the submarine. We ask a set of scholars to think with the tensions between the surface and the submarine, through their specific concerns, about post-imperial oceanics today. Conference organized by: Sharad Chari (Department of Geography, Berkeley), Charne Lavery (Oceanic Humanities in the Global South, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand), Isabel Hofmeyr (Oceanic Humanities in the Global South, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand). Nov 4, 2020 Opening Remarks: Sharad Chari (Berkeley) Keynote lecture: Laleh Khalili (Queen Mary, University of London) Panel I: Freighted Subjects Charmaine Chua (Santa Barbara) Renisa Mawani (UBC Vancouver) David Featherstone (Glasgow) Jeffrey Kahn (Davis) Laurel Mei-Singh (Hawai’i) Sharad Chari (Moderator) Nov 5, 2020 Opening Remarks: Charne Lavery (Wits) Panel II: Anti-Imperial Waters (Live on Nov 5, 2020 @ 9 am) Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA) Jaimey Hamilton-Faris (Hawai’i) Mae Miller (Berkeley) Ben Mendelsohn (Penn) Jennifer Gaynor (Buffalo) Charne Lavery (Moderator) Panel III: Submerged Matters (Live on Nov 5, 2020 @ 10 am) with Melody Jue, Rosanna Carver, Matt Shutzer, Pamila Gupta, Killian Quigley Melody Jue (Santa Barbara) Rosanna Carver (UBC Vancouver) Charmaine Chua Matt Shutzer (Berkeley) Pamila Gupta (Wits) Killian Quigley (Sydney) Meg Samuelson (Adelaide) Isabel Hofmeyr (Moderator) Closing Remarks: Isabel Hofmeyr (Wits) _________________ Image credit: "Ellen Gallagher" by C-Monster is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.