SHARAD CHARI
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Derek Walcott’s “The sea is history” ends with an enigmatic announcement of a new beginning. And yet, the contemporary oceans are frontiers of plunder and pollution. This course explores conceptual tools to critique oceanic extraction with Walcott’s political hope in mind. We do so through lectures and discussions around four areas tentatively posed as: (1) ‘Gramsci and the sea’ reads Antonio Gramsci’s brief interventions on oceans, his historical method, and his “absolute earthliness of thought” to frame ‘the oceanic question’; (2) ‘Extractivism and the Blue Economy’ engages categories of our time that respond in different ways to the instrumentalization of the ocean as resource, in relation to agrarian, Black and Southern Marxist traditions of critique; (3) ‘A last watery ghost dance of Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre’ picks up on Marx’s critique of the reifications of political economy through waves of critique of oceanic imperialism; and (4) ‘Oceanic International’ returns to Walcott’s political hope through oceanic circuits that have provoked conceptions of ‘the strike,’ ‘abolition,’ ‘the international,’ and the refusal of planetary ecocide. |
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Sharad Chari is an interdisciplinary geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliate of the Wits Institute for Social Economic Research (WISER), Johannesburg. He is the author of Fraternal Capital (Stanford, 2004) and Apartheid Remains (Duke, forthcoming); co-editor of Ethnographies of Power (Wits, 2022), Other Geographies (Wiley-Blackwell 2017); and on the editorial team of the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory. He works broadly in the areas of agrarian, Southern and Black Marxism and oceanic studies on a variety of topics including labor, racial/ sexual capitalism, biopolitics, and queer struggle, and in South India, South Africa and the African Indian Ocean. |