Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Trade Review
"May Joseph’s itinerary is singular but worldly, tending toward an otherworldliness where plenty bursts through colonial scarcities, where plenum pierces the One in everyone, where pleriplus is the genre of shared refuge in mobility. Her lyric, sharply analytic Sea Log is unprecedented and unanticipated in how it immediately establishes its absolute necessity. How else would we know how to sound the sound of the Indian Ocean as it washes New York shores?"
- Fred Moten, Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
"Historically revealing, and politically attuned to the ongoing moment of decolonization, May Joseph’s Sea Log brings us to the Indian Ocean and its archive of colonial affects, brilliantly meeting the necessity for understanding the geopolitical crises of climate and environment. Taking us across coastal regions between Asia and Africa, Sea Log is an intimate and lyrical encounter with the other-than-human that also critically engages the inhuman. Powerful and poetic, this book is a moving rendition of what is lost and mourned, and what remains and inspires."
- Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Writing Anthropocene
Preface: Decolonial Periplus
Part I
1. Indian Ocean Affect
2. Sea of Shock
3. Ocean Ontologies
4. Contested Visuality
Part II: Periplus
5. Cochin, Dhow City
6. Dar-Es-Salaam, Socialist Utopia
7. Hanoi Palimpsest
8. Bamiyan Pillage
9. New York: Archipelagoes of the Unseen
10. Deciphering the Indian Ocean
