Trans-Oceanic Cultural Commerce (March 2015)

with the support of School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies The Dean’s Fund Faculty of Arts

TRANS-OCEANIC CULTURAL COMMERCE

International Colloquium 27-28 March 2015 PROGRAMME

The world’s ocean basins, have, since the 1990s, increasingly been reconceptualized as areas of connection and creative fusion, innovation, and conflict. This conference seeks to foster the new articulations and crossfertilizations still needed not only by Indian Ocean studies, but also by scholars of the Atlantic and Pacific basins, in order to overcome the discursive disconnections bequeathed by colonial projects, and perpetuated with the rise of Area Studies in the post-colonial era. Alert to the distinct developmental trajectories of scholarship of these trans-oceanic regions, our aim is to unite scholars working with methodologies across the humanities and social sciences, to explore what insights might emerge from a broader exchange of ideas and research on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans respectively. In particular, the conference seeks to further define a trans-regional logic and methodology for trans-oceanic studies, by means of an initial focus on the diverse, and occasionally conflictive, culturally-specific conceptualisations of oceanic space identifiable in literature and the visual arts, religion, scientific enquiry, commercial practice and international law and diplomacy.

Organizers Mark Sabine & Rui Miranda

Friday 27 March

Venue: Highfield House A09

09.15-09.45

Welcome and Introduction Mark Sabine, Rui Miranda (University of Nottingham)

09.45-11.15

Chair: Gareth Stockey Joana Passos (CEHUM, Universidade do Minho) ‘India, China and the British in Amitav Gosh’s River of Smoke (2011): Trade and Competition in the Indian Ocean’ Mark R. Frost (University of Essex) Oceans of humanitarianism: explaining the Straits Settlements charitable funds ‘craze’, 1870-1920

11.15-11.45

Break

11.45-13.15

Chair: Rui Gonçalves Miranda Elena Brugioni (CEHUM, Universidade do Minho) Transnational Approaches to the Portuguese-speaking World: Mozambique and the Indian Ocean Mark Sabine (University of Nottingham, UK campus) The diminution of oceanic space in Luso-Asian cultural imaginaries

13.15-14.30

LUNCH at Mr Mann’s, Portland Building

14.30-16.30

Chair: Mark Sabine Onur Alptekin (University of Nottingham, UK Campus) Pirates on a Round-the-Atlantic-Tour Tim Harper (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge) ‘The Anarchic Ocean: reflections on a maritime underworld’ Sumit Mandal (University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus) ‘Miracles on the sea: Gravesites of Muslim Saints and the Indian Ocean’

16.30-17.00

Break

17.00-18.00

Round Table Discussion

Saturday 28 March Venue: Machicado Suite, Willoughby Hall 10.00-11.30

Chair: Bernard McGuirk Orlando Grossegesse (Universidade do Minho) Equatorial Baptism and the Transatlantic Translator Reborn – The case of Curt Meyer-Clason Rui Gonçalves Miranda (University of Nottingham, UK campus) ‘Finis Terrae: the Force of the Sea against the Law of the Land in Borges Coelho’s Índicos Indícios’

11.30-12.00

Break

12.00-13.30

Chair: Elena Brugioni Miguel Serra Coelho (European University Institute, Florence) Playing a Double Game?: Juscelino Kubitschek’s diplomacy and the case of Goa, 1956-1961’ Paul McGarr (University of Nottingham, UK campus) The 1961 Goa Crisis: The Cross-Cultural Diplomacy of Decolonization

13.30-14.30

LUNCH

14.30-16.00

Chair: Sumit Mandal Musab Younis (St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford) Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in the fields of Politics, History, and International Relations Emanuelle Santos (University of Warwick) The World, the Label and the Critic: Meditations on the Perishability of Transnational Critical Paradigms

16.00-18.00

Refreshments and informal concluding session