Sensing Colonial Ports and Global History: Agency, Affect, Temporality
An Interdisciplinary Conference at TORCH
This event is part of the TORCH Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH) Network.
Keynote Speakers:
Leila Fawaz (History, Tufts University)
Benjamin Walton (Music, University of Cambridge)
Registration Closed
Enquiries: cpagh@torch.ox.ac.uk
Organised by the Colonial Ports and Global History Network at the University of Oxford, this exciting interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from such disciplines and fields as Archaeology, Area Studies, English, History, Italian and Comparative Literature, Music, Sociology and Visual Anthropology.
The aim of the conference is to cross-examine three key concepts – agency, affect and temporality – that are increasingly central to scholarly thought about colonial port cities. In doing so, it also explores anew the implications of the ‘colonial port city’ for global history, both in and beyond the academy.
In addition to the four panels of individual papers, there will also be a World Café workshop for all of the attendees, with featured presenters and topics.
We are delighted to have two distinguished keynote speakers: Leila Fawaz, Issam M. Fares Chair of Lebanese & Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University, whose broad expertise encompasses migration, trade and war in the modern Middle East; and Benjamin Walton, Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge, whose rich expertise extends from touring opera troupes beyond Europe to the globalisation of opera in and beyond the nineteenth century.
On 2 May, lunch and tea/coffee will be provided. On 3 May, tea/coffee will be provided.
Please click below for the conference booklet (PDF):
Please click below for the conference timetable (Word):
Programme
2 MAY (THURSDAY)
8:45–9:00 Registration and Arrival
9:00–9:20 Welcome Remarks
Julia Binter and Yvonne Liao (University of Oxford)
9:20–11:20 World Café Workshop
Chair: Julia Binter (University of Oxford)
Featured presenters and topics:
Michael Leadbetter, Phacharaphorn Phanomvan, and Michael Yeo (University of Oxford)
What are port cities, and how should they be studied?
Moderator: Hatice Yıldız
David Martínez-Robles (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Rethinking colonial agency: The case of treaty ports
Moderators: Yvonne Liao and Min-Erh Wang
Ana Cristina Mendes (University of Lisbon)
Touring Mare Nostrum: The ethics of researching colonial port cities and sea travels in the Mediterranean
Moderator: Olivia Durand
Aaron Jaffer (National Maritime Museum)
Redressing silences in the archive
Moderator: Katharina Oke
11:20–11:50 Coffee Break
11:50–13:20 Panel 1
Consuming Colonial Ports: Consumption of Goods and Questions of Agency
Chair: Olivia Durand (University of Oxford)
Elizabeth Schmidt (University of California, Santa Barbara)
‘Sundry Sorts of Merchants Goods’: Consuming the Empire in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia
Mikko Toivanen (European University Institute)
Babel in the streets, Berlioz at the club: Mapping Class and Culture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Singapore and Batavia through Soundscapes
Emma Bond (University of St Andrews)
Playing with the Sugar Histories of Greenock
13:20–14:00 Lunch
14:05–15:35 Panel 2
Timing Colonial Ports: Global Time and Local Temporalities
Chair: Hatice Yıldız (University of Oxford)
David Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals–CSIC, Barcelona)
Temporality, Aesthetics, and Musical Novelty in Early Modern Colonial Port Cities
Nancy Cushing (University of Newcastle, Australia)
The Time Ball and the Time Gun: Marking Time in a Colonial Port City
Jessica Fernández de Lara Harada (University of Cambridge)
Summer Grass, Traces of the Brave Ones' Dream: Harada Hatsu on the recollection of a sense of a timeless Japan in Chiapas, Mexico
15:35–15:50 Coffee Break
15:50–16:50 Keynote: Leila Fawaz (Tufts University)
Chair: Hatice Yıldız
Reflecting on the port cities of the Levant during the Late Ottoman Period
18:00– Conference Dinner at Pierre Victoire for presenters and keynote speakers
3 MAY (FRIDAY)
8:15–8:30 Arrival
8:30–10:00 Panel 3
Experiencing Colonial Ports: Forming Global Bodies
Chair: Katharina Oke (King’s College London)
Debbie Onuoha (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Lagos, Lagos: Navigating Personal Histories between Two Port Cities on Film
Manikarnika Dutta (Wellcome Unit, University of Oxford)
‘Portals of Death’: European Seamen in the Colonial Port Cities of Calcutta and Bombay
Katherine Roscoe (University of Liverpool)
Embodied Experience and Unfree Labour in Port Cities: Convict Workers in Sydney and Gibraltar
10:00–10:20 Coffee Break
10:20–11:50 Panel 4
Sensing Colonial Ports: Affective Registers
Chair: Min-Erh Wang (University of Oxford)
Aatreyee Ghosh (Leiden University)
Looking from the Verandah: Interrogating the Border-Spaces of Port Towns Canton and Batavia through the Historical Fiction of Amitav Ghosh and David Mitchell
Alexander Petrov (Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences)
The Development of Colonial Ports in Russian America
Nagihan Haliloğlu (Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul)
Sensing and Resisting the Colonial Port in Istanbul in Leonard Woolf and Halide Edib’s Writing
12:00–13:00 Keynote: Benjamin Walton (University of Cambridge)
Chair: Yvonne Liao
Port Opera
13:00–13:10 Closing Remarks
Facilitator: Olivia Durand
