May Joseph - Böcker

The ocean has always been the harbinger of strangers to new shores. Migrations by sea have transformed modern conceptions of mobility and belonging, disrupting notions of how to write about movement, memory and displaced histories. Sea Log is a memory theater of repressive hauntings based on urban artifacts across a maritime archive of Dutch and Portuguese colonial pillage.Colonial incursions from the sea, and the postcolonial aftershocks of these violent sea histories, lie largely forgotten for most formerly colonized coastal communities around the world. Offering a feminist log of sea journeys from the Malabar Coast of South India, through the Atlantic to the North Sea, May Joseph writes a navigational history of postcolonial coastal displacements. Excavating Dutch, Portuguese, Arab, Asian and African influences along the Malabar Coast, Joseph unearths the undertow of colonialism’s ruins. In Sea Log, the Bosphorus, the Tagus and the Amstel find coherence alongside the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to historians of transnational communities, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology of space, area studies, maritime history and postcolonial studies.

A look at citizenship through the lens of performance.In a modern world of vast migrations and relocations, the rights-and rites-of citizenship are increasingly perplexing, and ever more important. This book asks how citizenship is enacted when all the world’s the stage.Kung Fu cinema, soul music, plays, and speeches are some of the media May Joseph considers as expressive negotiations for legal and cultural citizenship. Nomadic Identities combines material culture and historical approaches to forge connections between East Africa, India, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States in the struggles for democratic citizenship. Exploring the notion of nomadic citizenship as a modern construct, Joseph emphasizes culture as the volatile mise-en-scÈne through which popular conceptions of local and national citizenship emerge. Joseph, an Asian African from Tanzania, brings a personal insight to the question of how citizenship is expressed-particularly the nomadic, conditional citizenship related to histories of migrancy and the tenuous status of immigrants. Nomadic Identities investigates the metaphoric, literal, and performed possibilities available in different arenas of the everyday through which individuals and communities experience citizenship, successfully or not. A unique inquiry into contemporary experiences of migrancy linking Tanzania, Britain, and the United States, this book blends political theory, performance studies, cultural studies, and historical writing. It offers vignettes that describe the official and informal cultural transactions that designate citizenship under the globalizing forces of decolonization, the cold war, and transnational networks.Crossing the globe, Nomadic Identities provides fresh insights into the contemporary phenomena of territorial displacement and the resulting local and transnational movements of people.

A kaleidoscopic consideration of transnational culture and performanceAmid the modern-day complexities of migration and exile, immigration and repatriation, notions of stable national identity give way to ideas about cultural “hybridity.” The authors represented in this volume use different forms of performative writing to question this process, to ask how the production of new political identities destabilizes ideas about gender, sexuality, and the nation in the public sphere. Contributors use forms such as the essay, poem, photography, and case study to examine historically specific cases in which the notion of hybridity recasts our ideas of identity and performance: the struggle for Aboriginal land rights in Australia; Bahian carnival; the creolization and pidginization of language in the Caribbean world; queer videos; and others. Contributors: Meena Alexander, CUNY; Awam Amkpa, Mount Holyoke; Tony Birch; Barbara Browning, New York U; Manthia Diawara, New York U; Fiona Foley; Sikivu Hutchinson; Deborah A. Kapchan, U of Texas; Toby Miller, New York U; Shani Mootoo; Fred Moten, U of California, Santa Barbara; JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz, New York U; Chon A. Noriega, UCLA; Celeste Olalquiaga; Ella Shohat, CUNY; Robert Stam, New York U.

Hurricane Sandy was a fierce demonstration of the ecological vulnerability of New York, a city of islands. Yet the storm also revealed the resilience of a metropolis that has started during the past decade to reckon with its aqueous topography. In Fluid New York, May Joseph describes the many ways that New York, and New Yorkers, have begun to incorporate the city's archipelago ecology into plans for a livable and sustainable future. For instance, by cleaning its tidal marshes, the municipality has turned a previously dilapidated waterfront into a space for public leisure and rejuvenation. Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port-a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site-and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources-for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.

This book is an anthology of key essays that foregrounds coasts, islands, and shorelines as central to the scholarship on the oceanic environment and climate across South Asia. The volume is a collaborative effort amongst historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists to further understand the lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Terra Aqua invokes a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water—deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats—and engages in a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. The book explores uniquely endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against rising seas and climatic disturbances with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. A critical, transdisciplinary contribution to the study of climate change in South Asia, Terra Aqua examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the depletion of littoral lifeways impacting marine communities and biospheres. It will be of particular interest to scholars of environment studies, ecology and climate change in the Global South, hydrology, geography, ocean and island studies, environmental justice, colonialism, and imperial and maritime history.

This book is an anthology of key essays that foregrounds coasts, islands, and shorelines as central to the scholarship on the oceanic environment and climate across South Asia. The volume is a collaborative effort amongst historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists to further understand the lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Terra Aqua invokes a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water—deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats—and engages in a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. The book explores uniquely endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against rising seas and climatic disturbances with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. A critical, transdisciplinary contribution to the study of climate change in South Asia, Terra Aqua examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the depletion of littoral lifeways impacting marine communities and biospheres. It will be of particular interest to scholars of environment studies, ecology and climate change in the Global South, hydrology, geography, ocean and island studies, environmental justice, colonialism, and imperial and maritime history.

Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater’s ecological interventions and traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories, climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan’s site-specific performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena. Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia atlas is animated by a disorienting, anti-mapping strategy, producing a deterritorialized, nomadic, fluid atlas unfolding in real time as an archive of climate change in multidimensional, active space. The book is designed for pedagogical access, with interludes that consolidate the learning outcomes of the experimental theory animating each site-specific performance.Accompanied by close descriptions of five performances and supplemented by digital documentation available online, this volume intervenes in discussions on climate change, urbanism, and postcolonization/decolonialization, and contributes to interdisciplinary studies of ecology and environmental politics, postcolonial/decolonial theories and practices, performance studies and aesthetics, in particular public art, and performance as research.

Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater’s ecological interventions and traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories, climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan’s site-specific performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena. Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia atlas is animated by a disorienting, anti-mapping strategy, producing a deterritorialized, nomadic, fluid atlas unfolding in real time as an archive of climate change in multidimensional, active space. The book is designed for pedagogical access, with interludes that consolidate the learning outcomes of the experimental theory animating each site-specific performance.Accompanied by close descriptions of five performances and supplemented by digital documentation available online, this volume intervenes in discussions on climate change, urbanism, and postcolonization/decolonialization, and contributes to interdisciplinary studies of ecology and environmental politics, postcolonial/decolonial theories and practices, performance studies and aesthetics, in particular public art, and performance as research.

Aquapelagos is a cross-disciplinary volume that is geared to a general undergraduate and non-specialist readership while also being rigorous and theoretically exciting for doctoral and advanced researchers of climate and ocean studies. It foregrounds marine-terrestrial assemblages as philosophical, navigational, and knowledge-making interfaces.Drawing on ethnographic, geographic, architectural, sociological, and scientific methodogies, Aquapelagos sheds light on varied approaches, dialogues, and responses to the catastrophic and impending futures unfolding across waterfronts from the Andaman Islands, Maldives, and Indonesia to the Grand Banks and the Juan Fernandez Islands. It delves into pressing issues of human interrelations with aquatic environments, ocean volatility, ocean toxicity, flooding, inundation, mitigation, rising seas, and climate adaptation in interdisciplinary and comparative global terms. Within the conceptual framework of the aquapelago, the contributors to this volume explore aspects of integrated terrestrial and marine assemblages that enhance our understanding of the impact of global climate change and related rising sea levels on diverse planetary ecologies and the societies that depend on them.The volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students of ethnography, social anthropology, climate action, development studies, public policy, and climate change.

Aquapelagos is a cross-disciplinary volume that is geared to a general undergraduate and non-specialist readership while also being rigorous and theoretically exciting for doctoral and advanced researchers of climate and ocean studies. It foregrounds marine-terrestrial assemblages as philosophical, navigational, and knowledge-making interfaces.Drawing on ethnographic, geographic, architectural, sociological, and scientific methodogies, Aquapelagos sheds light on varied approaches, dialogues, and responses to the catastrophic and impending futures unfolding across waterfronts from the Andaman Islands, Maldives, and Indonesia to the Grand Banks and the Juan Fernandez Islands. It delves into pressing issues of human interrelations with aquatic environments, ocean volatility, ocean toxicity, flooding, inundation, mitigation, rising seas, and climate adaptation in interdisciplinary and comparative global terms. Within the conceptual framework of the aquapelago, the contributors to this volume explore aspects of integrated terrestrial and marine assemblages that enhance our understanding of the impact of global climate change and related rising sea levels on diverse planetary ecologies and the societies that depend on them.The volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students of ethnography, social anthropology, climate action, development studies, public policy, and climate change.