CFP: ‘Salty’ Geographies: Subaltern maritime networks, spaces and practices
Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow,
October 8-10 2010
Organised by David Featherstone & William Hasty (University of Glasgow)
Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG.
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Invited speakers include:
Professor Marcus Rediker, Professor and Chair of History, University of
Pittsburgh (Author of The Slave Ship: A Human History and co-author with
Peter Linebaugh of the Many Headed Hydra).
Professor Lakshmi Subramanian, Professor of History, Department of
History Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi (Author of Indigenous Capital and
Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast)
Dr Jeremy Anderson and Paula Hamilton, International Transport Workers’
Federation
Dr Dan Clayton, School of Geography and Geo-sciences, University of St
Andrews (author of Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of
Vancouver Island)
Dr Stephanie Jones, English, School of Humanities, University of
Southampton (editor of Imagining the Indian Ocean: A Reader, forthcoming).
Dr David Lambert, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of
London (White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity in the Age of
Abolition)
Dr Carl Thompson, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent
University (author of The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic
Imagination)
Over the last decade or so, geographers have begun to critically engage
with the maritime realms of the past and the present, signalling
something of a shift from the territorial focus which had dominated the
discipline for so long. The worlds of sailors and ships, slaves and
merchants, dockworkers and ports, and even the sea itself have been
explored through the lens of geography. This has led to the
foregrounding of new debates and perspectives in relation to existing
concerns within the discipline and has reworked understandings of
processes such as imperialism and slavery. It has also offered new
points of departure from which research can emerge. Geographers have,
among other things, begun to engage with the politics of maritime
networks (Lambert 2005), the spatial constitution of maritime networks
(Ogborn 2008), explore forms of subaltern agency and identity
constituted by maritime workers (Featherstone 2008), and interrogate the
spatial imaginaries of the ocean (Steinberg 2001).
Much of this work has been positioned in relation to productive
theoretical and empirical attempts to ‘historicise the ocean’ (Klein and
MacKenthun 2004); a paradigm shift in historical studies which advances
a major challenge to existing work in social and political history. This
work has included pioneering work on various forms of Atlantic
radicalism(Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Rediker 2004, 2007, Scott 1986),
on the maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean, (Pearson, 2003, Subramanian,
2003), an historical ethnography of the HMS Bounty mutineers (Dening
1992), an account of slave-ship sailors (Christopher 2006), and work on
the presence of Africans in the Atlantic (Bolster 1997; Gilroy 1992).
This work has led to an important revisioning of nation-centred
histories of radical movements and forms of social practices and opened
up new ways of engaging with subaltern identities, agency and practices.
While drawing on this body of work for inspiration, this symposium seeks
to critically engage with the work that has been advanced in maritime
geographies thus far and prompt new research agendas in the process. The
programme of events spanning two days will include keynote talks, papers
and workshops dealing with methodological and theoretical issues.
Key questions:
• How does a focus on maritime connections refigure terracentric
conceptions of nation and empire?
• What are the sites/spaces of the ship?
• How does a focus on the littoral refigure notions of space and place?
• What are the spatial practices of maritime geographies of labour and
organising?
• What are the geographies of pirates and piracy?
• How does thinking in explicitly spatial terms reconfigure the terms of
debate of existing work on maritime histories?
• How are maritime spaces constituted through transnational and
multi-ethnic relations?
• What are the gendered spatial practices of maritime worlds?
• What human/ non-human configurations are constituted through maritime
networks?
• What productive methodologies are engendered by an attention to
maritime geographies?
**Two travel bursaries are available for Historical Geography Research
Group postgraduate members presenting at this conference**
Deadline for abstracts of 2-300 words and applications for travel
bursaries: 31st May, 2010.
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