Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) will host its third international symposium on the Indian Ocean World, titled “Commerce with the Universe: Histories, Connectivities, Imaginings”, today.
The event will feature a multidisciplinary panel of Doha-based and international scholars, seeking to redefine the cultural, economic, political and historical ties between the Gulf region and Africa.
The symposium will focus on issues of mobility, maritime history, slavery, aesthetic and cultural exchanges and diasporic circularities involving the coastal states bordering the Indian Ocean.
“Through our working group, which was founded three years ago by faculty from Georgetown, Qatar and Northwestern University, including Amira Sonbol, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Phoebe Musandu, Ahmad Sikainga, Sandra Richards and Abdalla Baboud, we hoped to build a research initiative on the Indian Ocean and Africa connections, social forces and political histories to create a new re-map of these linkages that have gone unnoticed or inadequately documented. We want to know how the Indian Ocean rim came to be,” said Dr Rogaia Abusharaf, associate professor of anthropology, GU-Q.
The title and theme of the conference are inspired by the work of Gaurav Desai, an English professor at Tulane University. His book, ‘Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination’, builds an alternative history of Africa’s experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism and globalisation using both life narratives and literary texts.
“We hope to find answers to our questions through a new lens, through the writings of literature, straightforward accounts of history and how the Indian Ocean is really imagined through these different narratives. We asked the scholars presenting their papers at the conference – ‘how do you take this notion of commerce as presented in this book, and make it relevant to your discipline?’,” it was observed.
The symposium, taking place from 9am to 4.30 pm, is free and open to the public.