Water, Method, Archive
Panel 12
Water, Method, Archive
Tuesday, 5 July 2022
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Location: ROOM 101A
Panel Speakers
Aanchal Saraf
Nathan Carlos Norris
Adam Jadhav
Moderated by: Lynette Russell
Deep ocean time: Transpacific colonialisms and archival ethics
Aanchal Saraf
This paper considers how the Cold War has shaped how we narrate history, especially in a place like the Marshall Islands, whose paper archives have been so impacted by multiple wars, nuclear detonations, climate crises, and other enduring colonial formations. This paper reads non-papery archives in relation to deep ocean time and to the slow violence of nuclear colonialism and climate change. Deep ocean time attends to the depths of the ocean, not just its surface. In emphasizing the ocean’s depth and abundance, this paper underscores not just the importance of the Marshall Islands, but also the oceanic livingness of the waters in between and below. The paper opens with a haunting ethnographic vignette about a closet at the Historical Preservation Office in Majuro, RMI, filled with unmarked bones that betray the collusion of empires. It moves outward to consider water-damaged archives in Alele Museum and the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in Majuro. The paper’s last archival site is the Marianas Trench, proposed by Japan as a nuclear waste disposal site, now home to creatures whose exoskeletons contain “bomb carbon.” The paper ends with an analysis of “Water Talks” given by artists Joy Enomoto and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner in conjunction with their installation, “SOUNDING,” as part of 2020’s “Inundation,” a collaborative exhibition on climate crisis and justice by multiple Pacific Islander artists. Enomoto and Jetñil-Kijiner’s work offers a different sensorium of history that emerges from oceanic thinking, rather than moving terrestrial metaphors inappropriately onto oceanic space.
Aanchal Saraf is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments. Her dissertation, titled Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives: Unsettling the Geographies and Science of Nuclear Colonialism in the Marshall Islands and Hawaiʻi, demonstrates how US Cold War nuclear colonialism continues to shape our cartographic and archival imaginaries of the Pacific, as well as structures academic knowledge production. Her interdisciplinary project engages official archives, oral histories, cultural production and performance, Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms, and ethnography. She has most recently published in The Journal of Transnational American Studies and Women & Performance.
Cataloging the Ocean: Continents, Archives, Historical Method
Nathan Carlos Norris
This paper contemplates the fractured epistemic landscape of modern area studies; an inherited geographic dictate that splits the writing of history along imagined terrestrial lines. To expand on the sentiment of the late Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa, the Pacific’s Indigenous inhabitants share a common history of the sea only more recently hyper-differentiated and divided up with the advent of colonial conquest. My project unites the history of the Rapanui (of Rapa Nui or Easter Island) with that of the Indigenous seafaring people of southern Chile; for instance, Kawésqar, Selk’nam, and Yaghan. I argue that a holistic approach to our shared global ocean and the people most familiar with it can yield unexpected results, destabilizing and adjusting our overly land-centered historical vantage point in favor of a more amphibious retrieval of the past and telling of history. The history of sea-centered Indigenous peoples necessitates a method sensitive to metageographies and aqueous spaces—this can be difficult given that historians require research grounded in archives, often housed in capital cities of nation-states where information is centralized and cataloged for (water-based) places and people located throughout distant territories. What does it take for history writing to see past the geographic breaks ingrained in the extant paper trail? How can alternative approaches to archival research more clearly adjust for the seagoing and peripatetic nature of humankind? In what ways do continents and regions act as divides, often belying shared histories?
Nathan Carlos Norris is a PhD candidate in the Cornell History department with a specialization in Latin American and world history. His research interests include spatial theory, geography, mapping and cartography, Indigenous history, infrastructure, steamships, capitalism, land use, and sheep and cattle ranching. Norris completed his MA thesis at CUNY Hunter College on the topic of squatters and architects in 20th-century Santiago de Chile. At Cornell, his project has zoomed out to investigate the history of southern and island Chile, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the American Pacific littoral more broadly.
Fishing for empire:
Marine science, policy and the social production of the British colonial seas
Adam Jadhav
British imperial science of the 20th century was a multivalent, polycentric affair. It was also decidedly oceanic. These insistences are the point of departure for this paper’s attempt to unpack the material, discursive and epistemological practices and perspectives that socially produced fish and fisheries across colonial geographies. The primary empirical foundations of this paper are two-fold. First, I critically read (and read around) policy documents and published research describing/prescribing the development of oceanic fisheries and people, written by James Hornell, an early 20th-century British marine biologist, technologist and pseudo-anthropologist. Second, I turn to Hornell's personal papers, a collection of thousands of pages of drafts, notes, diaries, photos, correspondence and more held at Cambridge University. I argue that Hornell’s imperial career, starting with hands-on research and management in Sri Lanka and India, is exemplary of how the British colonial project sought to “improve” and exploit fisheries — often unsuccessfully — amid imperial race/class hierarchies, logics of liberal governance and the compulsions of commodity capitalism. My analysis attempts to read both against and along the grain of the archives following the methods of Ranajit Guha (and the wider subaltern studies collective) as well as Ann Stoler. This work also speaks into debates among history of science scholars about the character of empire — diffusionist, extractivist, post-colonial or networked. I conclude with a rumination on the question of how decolonial scholarship and politics can and must respond to what I argue is a persistent, durable imperial approach to oceanic life and livelihood.
Adam Jadhav is a PhD candidate at the University of California at Berkeley. His ongoing dissertation research explores the material and discursive production of India's colonial and postcolonial seas.