Third international symposium remapping the Indian Ocean World Georgetown University-Qatar conference

Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) will be hosting its third international symposium on the Indian Ocean World titled “Commerce with the Universe: Histories, Connectivities, Imaginings,” on April 25, from 9:00 am - 4:30 pm, featuring 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.

“Africa and the Gulf connectivity is not receiving the attention it deserves. 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 to 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, one of the conference co-organizers and Associate Professor of Anthropology at GU-Q.

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. 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 globalization 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?”

The first conference panel is titled “Commerce with the Universe: A Discussion with Guarav Desa.” The second panel is “Narrating the Indian Ocean,” and the last panel will focus on  the changing security landscape in the Indian Ocean World.  The symposium is free and open to the public.