>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
> Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process
> An interdisciplinary conference to be held in Perth, Western Australia
> July 13-16, 2005
>
> Convenors:
> Professor Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh
> Professor Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania, Australia
>
> Sponsored by the International Centre for Convict Studies and the
> Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia,
> will be hosted by the Western Australia Maritime Museum in Fremantle
> (near Perth), Australia.  Located in a working port on the Indian
> Ocean, this dynamic institution offers a vibrant maritime atmosphere.
> The  conference will build on a highly successful predecessor, "Sea
> Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, c. 1500 - c. 1900," which was held at
> the University of Greifswald, Germany,in  July, 2000.
>
> The aim of this international conference is to explore the social and
> cultural  transformations caused by the transport of labor, unfree and
> free,around  and across the  Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Our
> definition of the ocean includes riverine and other hydrographic
> systems that connect to it.
>
> We seek to investigate, compare, and connect the experiences of slaves,
> indentured servants, transported convicts, political prisoners,
> sailors, and migrants of all kinds, and to consider ships as places
> where their struggles have made history.
>
> We take our title from the infamous African slave trade.  Abolitionists
> made the middle passage an enduring symbol of degradation - brutality,
> inhumanity, suffering, and death - but we now begin to understand that
> between the decks of these vessels of howling misery lay creativity,
> something new: the origins of defiant, resilient, life-affirming
> African-American and Afro-Caribbean cultures. This contradictory
> epitome can help to illuminate other middle passages in which the
> oceanic voyage was the structuring link between  expropriation in one
> geographic setting and exploitation in another.
>
> The conference builds on, and hopes to expand, exciting new scholarship
> on
> the diverse men and women who labored and traveled in ships around the
> world, often forced from their home and family to work in strange new
> lands.
>
> Within an interdisciplinary forum we will ask these questions:
>
> *How did middle passages affect those who made them?
>
> *How did they shape their understanding of themselves and their
> relations to others?
>
> *How did ships function as transnational contact zones?
>
> *How did ships and middle passages serve an expanding system of global
> capitalism?
>
> *How do the national histories of America and other new world societies
> look when viewed  not from the vantage of settlers on land but rather
> migrants aboard transoceanic ships?
>
> We encourage submissions from historians, literary and cultural critics,
> archaeologists, geographers, museum professionals, and others who seek
> in
> interdisciplinary fashion to  combine various aspects of the general
> theme.
>
> We invite papers that emphasize the  transformative historical function
> of
> vessels of all kinds, from the smallest indigenous  canoe to the
> deep-sea
> vessel of the age of sail, to the largest modern cargo ship,
> especially related to these specific themes:
>
> Early modern maritime culture
> The sea peoples of Oceania
> Penal transportation
> The social construction of the ocean
> Middle passage of the transatlantic slave trade.
> Human movement across the Indian Ocean
> Forced migration and New World Societies
> Boat people and asylum seekers
> The Black Atlantic
>
> Please send abstracts of 300 words to Emma Christopher at
> <[log in to unmask]>.
>
> DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS  31 AUGUST  2004