The activities of the network project will include three international conferences in South Africa, India and Denmark, which will be held in January 2009, November 2009, and September 2010, as well as a number of smaller workshops. PhD students and other research trainees will be important participants. A special international workshop will be held in Zanzibar in May 2011 in collaboration with the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute (ZIORI)

Special workshop

organised by the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute (ZIORI) and the Research Network on ‘The Indian Ocean as Visionary Area: Post-Multiculturalist Approaches to the Study of Culture and Globalisation’ (IOVA)

on

Development, Geopolitics and Cultural Exchange in the Indian Ocean

Conveners: Abdul Sheriff and Preben Kaarsholm

Venue: Zanzibar Ocean View Hotel

Time: 26 to 29 May 2011

For further information about ZIORI, please visit:

http://ziori.duranpereira.com/

For further information about IOVA, please visit:

http://www.ruc.dk/isg_en/indianocean/

Outline of workshop focus

Over the last century the Indian Ocean region has experienced social, political and cultural reconfigurations that are the outcomes of distinct regional circumstances, but also mirror broader global transformations since the colonial era. Regional resources – notably fossil fuels – have positioned the Indian Ocean rim as a critical arena for both the global economy and geopolitics. At the same time, recent scholarship has traced how colonialism, independence and the Cold War engendered novel forms of collaboration across the Indian Ocean region, while evolving communication technologies contributed to new cultural imaginations.

The tensions of decolonization, and the different paths pursued by littoral societies in the context of Cold War rivalry, created postcolonial legal edifices – entailing new definitions of the citizen and the political actor – and systems of governance, that had profound effects on modes of identification, and in some cases spurred foreign intervention. Furthermore, frustration with the lack of rapid economic growth brought about instabilities, which paradoxically contributed both to state fragility and more robust regimes of control.

The restructuring of the world capitalist order in recent decades has created opportunities for new powers to emerge from within the Indian Ocean – most notably China and India – that pose economic and, perhaps in the long run, political challenges to older global powerbrokers. This has established possibilities for the emergence of a more multi-polar world in which economic development and geopolitical alignments in the Indian Ocean are taking centre stage. The heightened US military presence in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, South Asia and on Indian Ocean islands in the context of the ‘global war on terror’ has fueled tensions between local concerns and transnational regimes of control. At the same time a new and more multi-polar power structure may help to bring about new forms of cultural connectivities and agendas for political collaboration and exchange.

These issues have deep historical resonances. Work by historians of the Indian Ocean has shown how questions surrounding piracy, jurisdiction, non-state networks and governance were prominent throughout the region’s history, from the rise of Islam to the age of empires. Just as important, historical reflections have demonstrated how a range of groups contributed to shaping the legal, political and cultural contours of the Indian Ocean region.

This workshop aims to explore how systems of power and approaches to development have shaped the societies of the Indian Ocean rim both in the past and the present. Further, the workshop will address the significance of the combination of economic transformation and changing modes of human connectivity for the region as well as what such developments may mean for the future of the Indian Ocean and the world.

The conveners welcome papers directed at diverse perspectives and time periods. We hope to spark a lively conversation across disciplines and, to this end, encourage the participation of scholars with a background in international relations, history, political science, cultural and religious studies and other relevant fields.

Draft workshop programme as of 23 May 2011 in PDF

Conference Three

Research Network on ‘The Indian Ocean as Visionary Area: Post-Multiculturalist Approaches to the Study of Culture and Globalisation’

Call for papers

Conference on

'Religion, Law and Regimes of Control around the Indian Ocean'

Conveners: Bodil Folke Frederiksen – bodilff@ruc.dk – and Preben Kaarsholm – preben@ruc.dk

Venue: Hotel Romantik, Bornholm, Denmark

Time: 1 to 4 September 2010

Abstracts of appr. 500 words should be sent as e-mail attachments in Word to Inge Jensen at Roskilde University, Denmark – inge@ruc.dk – before 3 May 2010.

The deadline for submission of papers accepted for presentation will be 15 July 2010.

Accommodation in Bornholm for the three nights of the conference will be offered to paper presenters, but they will be expected to cover their own costs of travel. A small number of travel subsidies can be applied for from the organizers by paper presenters, who are members of the Indian Ocean network, and unable to raise their own travel funds.

For further information about the Indian Ocean network, please see:

www.ruc.dk/isg_en/indianocean/

Outline of conference focus

Earlier conferences of the Indian Ocean network were held in Johannesburg in January 2009 (’Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean’) and in Goa in November 2009 (‘Connecting Histories across the Indian Ocean: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture’). In the third network conference on ‘Religion, Law and Regimes of Control’, we want to explore in greater depth aspects of power, control, and security in the Indian Ocean world in both a historical and contemporary perspective. Recent research on the Indian Ocean has established a new understanding of the social and cultural networks of movement across the Ocean. It has demonstrated how capital and labour, merchants and seamen, scholars and saints intersected webs of regime to develop new notions of mobility and emancipation, and generate discourses and practices of nationalism, trans-nationalism, and labour solidarity. At the same time, new forms of legal regulation were imposed across the Indian Ocean to grapple with problems of predation, dissidence and sedition. The conference aims to explore the ambiguity of religious and jurisdictional fluidity co-existing with new forms of moral fundamentalism and legal governance in the Indian Ocean, and to explore struggles around the creation of new spaces for respectability, entitlement and citizenship. The conference invites papers from researchers and research students working on religion and religious practice, on law and resistance in the Indian Ocean, on the intersection of religion, law and politics, on the articulation of a wider public sphere in the Ocean through networks of labour, pilgrimage and religious propagation, and on the emergence of the Indian Ocean world in the 21st century as a major arena for security concerns and ‘the global war on terror’.

Bornholm workshop programme in PDF

Conference Two

'Connecting Histories across the Indian Ocean: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture', Goa, 19-21 November 2009.

Convenors: Pamila Gupta, Preben Kaarsholm and Rochelle Pinto

Conference programme as of 14 November in PDF

Abstracts for Goa papers accepted in PDF

Call for papers - please see below or Download PDF

Conference on ‘Connecting Histories across the Indian Ocean: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture’

Conveners: Pamila Gupta – pamila.gupta@wits.ac.za – Preben Kaarsholm – preben@ruc.dk – and Rochelle Pinto – rochellepinto@yahoo.com

Venue: The Sun–n–Sand Hotel, Panjim, Goa

Time: 19 to 21 November 2009

Abstracts of appr. 500 words should be sent as e-mail attachments in Word to Inge Jensen at Roskilde University, Denmark – inge@ruc.dk – before 30 April 2009.

The deadline for submission of papers accepted for presentation will be 15 October 2009.

Accommodation in Goa for the three nights of the conference will be offered to paper presenters, but they will be expected to cover their own costs of travel. A small number of travel subsidies can be applied for from the organizers by paper presenters, who are members of the Indian Ocean network, and unable to raise their own travel funds.

For further information about the Indian Ocean network, please see: www.ruc.dk/isg_en/indianocean/

Outline of conference focus

An earlier Indian Ocean network conference in Johannesburg in January this year explored ‘Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean’. At the Goa conference, the aim is to develop further agendas for transnational research, transcending the points of reference provided by national historiographies. An important focus will be the dynamics of port cities, places of transit, and networks of migration, trade and communications, whose interconnectivities criss-cross the histories of empires, colonies and nations. Another focus will be the interaction of religious mobilisations and discourse in the Indian Ocean region – dialogues and confrontations between Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and other institutions and practices of faith. The interaction of religious diasporas and imperial structures will constitute a further theme. The conference will also bring into the discussion other types of popular cultural articulation and will attempt to understand the cross-border characteristics of identity strategies, cultural politics and struggles over citizenship within the Indian Ocean arena from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

Conference One

’Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean’, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 15 to 17 January 2009.

Convenors: Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm

Call for papers - please see below or Download PDF

Abstracts for papers accepted in PDF

Download revised program as of 11 January in PDF

Conference Three

Synthesising conference, Bornholm, Denmark, September 2010.

Convenors: Bodil Folke Frederiksen and Preben Kaarsholm

Call for papers to go out in March 2010.

Call for papers Conference One

‘Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean’

Conveners: Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm

Venue: The Wits Club, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Time: 15 to 17 January 2009

Abstracts of appr. 500 words should be sent as e-mail attachments in Word to Inge Jensen at Roskilde University, Denmark, before 6 October 2008.

The deadline for submission of papers accepted for presentation will be 14 December 2008.

Accommodation in Johannesburg for the three nights of the conference will be offered to paper presenters, but they will be expected to cover their own costs of travel. A small number of travel subsidies can be applied for from the organizers by paper presenters, who are members of the Indian Ocean network, and unable to raise their own travel funds. A further two travel subsidies for paper presenters from the Southern African region may become available, but this cannot yet be guaranteed.

Outline of conference focus

As a range of scholarly work is starting to demonstrate, the imperial cities of the Indian Ocean sustained a distinctive public sphere that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War (Bang, Bose, Harper, Frost, Ho, Metcalfe, Pinto – see below). The Indian Ocean was the site of several overlapping diasporas whose educated classes gathered in the ports around the ocean. Together these cities constituted a network of textual exchange and circulation which built on, sustained and invented forms of universalism across the Indian Ocean. Some of these universalisms were religious in character as were apparent in pan-Buddhism and pan-Islamic movements. There were also traditions of transnational social organisationsmobilisation like anarchism or socialism that were anti-colonial in character. Beliefs in a ‘colour-blind’ imperial citizenship provided yet another template of universalism, which in turn was challenged by new types of nationalist organisation that questioned the rightfulness of imperial sovereignty, and drew strength and inspiration themselves from transnational networks of publication and debate, stretching across the Indian Ocean. Such diasporic universalisms and notions of public-ness have long been obscured, falling outside studies of empire and studies of the nation.

From the interwar years1920s onwards, through phases of the struggles for independence and post-independence decadesdevelopments, significant elements offrom these public spheres became incorporated in national public cultures, moved inland and came to encompass not only coastal cities, but also the hinterlands and interior urban centres. Increasingly, anti-colonial resistance, sometime based on nationalismsorganised in nationalist or pan-ethnic movements, inserted itselfthemselves into the larger imperial public spheres, or createdestablished their own text circuits of texts and discussion. Politics, ideas and genres that were generated through flows across the ocean moved ashore and came to influence, contest and compete with more localiszed political and cultural expressions. ByIn contrast, the texts and ideas emerging in this way were far from ‘colour-blind’, but often very explicitly critical and subversive of the hegemony of empire.

With the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, networks of these various kinds are moving to the fore, and the study of them is helpful in revising understandings of colonial encounter as not only the interaction of the local and the global, but rather also as an encounter of different universalisms and their localized political inputs and inflectionthe forms of expression they came to take through local appropriations and inflectionss..

One key feature of the intellectual circuits was a rich flow of print materials: newspapers, letters, pamphlets, journals, debating society reports. This conference seeks to probe this world of Indian Ocean print culture and the interactions of different movements and ideologies of universalism and nationalism within them. Some themes include:

• New modes of printing: Indian Ocean printing presses drew together printers from different traditions (e.g. Mauritius, South India, Gujarat etc). How were these different traditions combined in different print shops and how might this change our definitions of printing and publishing?

• Translation and multilingualism: most Indian Ocean printshops were multilingual with processes of translation forming part of the labour routines of the printing and publishing process. How do we analyses the multilingual processes, and how might they change our views of publishing and printing and of the modes of functioning of the public spheres in question?

• Genres and modes of address: In order to bring an Indian Ocean public into being, these print materials had to formulate new genres and modes of address. What are these and how might we best analyse them?

• Circuits of credit: how were these presses funded and what can we learn from this? • Print culture and reform: many printing presses were not simply seen as commercial operations but formed part of social and religious reform projects. How can print culture and reform movements throw light on each other?

• Universalisms and nationalisms: how did movements and expressions of transnationalist and universalist aspiration interact with the formation of nationalist organizations?

• Religion and politics: in what ways did transnational efforts of religious reform relate to discursive and political confrontations and mediations between imperialism, colonialism and nationalism?

References

Bang, Anne. Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860-1925. London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in an Age of Global Imperialism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Frost, Mark Ravinder. “‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870-1920”. In Modern Asian Studies 36 (4) 2002, 937-67.

Harper, TN. “Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914’ in AG Hopkins (ed). Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico, 2002.

Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Metcalfe, Thomas. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Pinto, Rochelle. Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.