SPAIS annual lecture: The Corporeal Life of Commerce at Sea
Professor Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London
Priory Road Complex D Block, Lecture theatre 2D1
The everyday life of seafarers steaming across Arab seas and serving Arab ports today is shaped not only by their daily interactions with one another and with their officers (who are often of other nationalities), but also by the corporeal transformations they experience in their sensory relationship with the sea and the stars, the weather, and the technology around them. The body of the seafarer is the fulcrum upon which global and workplace asymmetries of power, long traditions and conventions of seafaring, and gendered and racialised subjectivities all conjoin in complex and unexpected ways. I will speak not only of wages stolen and hunger ships managed by rapacious and unregulated shipping companies or the affective power of loneliness and loss at sea, but also the ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity forged aboard ships, and of the pleasures of arrival at ports. In focusing on the corporeal life of commerce at sea, I pay heed to exhortations of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism to centre the lives of those forgotten or dismissed at the conjuncture of capital accumulation and raced and gendered hierarchies.
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A recording of this lecture is now available at
https://mediasite.bris.ac.uk/Mediasite/Play/54a27a0e7ca547afa55f857e4ee593291d
Contact information
Laleh Khalili is a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013) and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020). She is currently working on an amorphous project on the planetary everyday life of oil.
