Dilip M. Menon – författare

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future.

The volume:

• Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans;

• Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of “native travel”;

•Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement;

•Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far.

As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future.

The volume:

• Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans;

• Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of “native travel”;

•Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement;

•Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far.

As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers.

The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers.

The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt.

The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general.

The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.