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Theme: 2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Ananya Kabir
King's College London, United Kingdom
Priyanka Basu
King's College London, United Kingdom
Luca Raimondi
King's College London, United Kingdom
Luca Raimondi
King's College London, United Kingdom
Priyanka Basu
King's College London, United Kingdom
Sourit Bhattacharya
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Sujatro Ghosh
Independent artist, Kolkata/ Berlin, Germany
Arunima Bhattacharya
Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom
‘The Haptic Potency of Rice’ is the second of four linked panels under the title of ‘Archipelagic Asias: Modalities and Methods’ that the convenors have assembled in response to the thematic cluster ‘From Oceanic Crossroads: Empire, Networks, and Histories’. Asia, from the pre-colonial period onwards, has functioned as an oceanic crossroads between empires, continents and other oceans, not least because of its entire southern edge that provides the Indian Ocean with a littoral connected on its western wing to the east coast of Africa right down to the Cape of Good Hope, and dissolving into a mass of islands, peninsulas, and archipelagos on its eastern, Pacific-facing side. Living on this extensive, complexly indented littoral with its passageways to the connected oceans, and, therefore, inhabiting and shaping these oceanic crossroads, are the people of Asia who have generated networks of know-how as well as transregional cultural and political histories. At the same time, the colonial and postcolonial histories that have fractured Asia, Asia’s geographic vastness and cultural variety, and the disciplinary silos of our academic training, all create gaps of memory, history, critical method and vocabulary that impede attempts to recover those connected histories and their contemporary manifestations. In response to this challenge, the organisers of these panels bring to the study of Asia archipelagic theory, a body of thought that turns to the archipelago as not only a geographic but an epistemic structure capable of productively reconfiguring gaps and fragments in hitherto unforeseen ways. Through the four panels we reconfigure archipelagic theory’s materials to fit the Asian context. We bring thereby to the emergent scholarly assemblage of ‘global Asias’ the vocabulary of creolisation and transculturation refreshed through the archipelagic approach. Each panel is assembled around a particular heuristic modality as signalled in its title. The individual presentations assemble different perspectives on this modality to reveal an Asia defined not by constrictions of nation-states, geopolitics, mother languages, and religious orthopraxy, but assembled, experienced and remembered through a mesh of contingent connections and alternative modernities.
In this panel, three literary historians and an artist investigate the sensory pleasures and emotional density of rice as the basis for creativity, resistance, and connection. As rice is a staple food grain in Monsoon Asia it is presented as a modality for grasping the IOW as oceanic crossroads, that will spark debate and response from a range of conference attendees both local and international.
Institutional panel by: King’s College London
Presenter: Sourit Bhattacharya – University of Edinburgh
Presenter: Sujatro Ghosh – Independent artist, Kolkata/ Berlin
Presenter: Arunima Bhattacharya – Edinburgh Napier University