RANJANA KHANNA and SARAH NUTTALL
On submergence

AFTERNOON COURSE
June 28 and 29, 2022
2:00 - 4:00 pm (GMT +2)

This course approaches ‘the sea’ via the question: how might we undo the overwhelmingly ‘dry’ registers of so much critical thought today? It will engage with a compelling body of scholarship that moves away from surface-oriented approaches to the ocean. This scholarly work explores the limits of land-based epistemologies by engaging with the sea as depth and as material force. These include registers of hydrocolonialism (Hofmeyr); hydrocosmologies which draw ancestral and inspirited waters into view; the vertical ocean (Lavery); the sea deep within (the metaphysical significance of the human body having almost precisely the same water content as the planet’s surface), including mnemonic invocations of ancient inland seas that provide refuge from land-based settler forms; the hypersea (Peters and Steinberg) as a global environment that is fundamentally oceanic in nature, even as its fluidity may be masked; and forms of immersion and inundation which reveal that terrestrial contexts are but one milieu for cognition to press up against (Jue).  We will read excerpts from Ben Smith’s novel Doggerland, which explores future forms of extractive labour set on a submerged wind farm in the North Sea after a period of intense climate change; and make reference to Khadija Abdalla’s Bajaber’s fabulist novel, The House of Rust, set off shore from Mombasa, Kenya. Critical readings will be drawn predominantly from emerging global South scholarship on seascapes and submergence.

Ranjana Khanna is Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, and Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford University Press, 2008.) She has published in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History, positions, SAQ, Feminist Theory, and Public Culture. Her current book manuscripts in progress are called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice and Technologies of Unbelonging.

Sarah Nuttall is the Director of WiSER since January 2013, where she was a prominent Senior Researcher from 2000 until 2010. Born in South Africa and educated at the Universities of (then) Natal and Cape Town, Sarah won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to read for a D.Phil. at Oxford. A literary scholar by training, Sarah’s varied research interests and prolific publication record have established her as a leading cultural commentator and critic as well as one of the leading scholars of her generation. She has lectured at the University of Stellenbosch and, for the past five years, has been a Visiting Professor at Yale University and Duke University. Sarah has edited several path-breaking books; her influential monograph, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid, explores mutuality, transgression and embodiment in contemporary South Africa. Sarah has published in various journals including in Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of South African Studies, Public Culture, Third Text and Social Dynamics. She is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Southern African Studies, Humanity, Cultural Studies, Social Dynamics, English Studies in Africa, and English Academy Review.