Panel 5
Disrupting imperial geographies
Friday 7 May 2021
3:25 - 4:24 pm (PDT)
Panel speakers:
May Joseph
Beatrice Glow
Kristie Flannery
Moderated by Rosanna Carver
Purging the Past:
Ocean Ontologies, Climate Change and the Ghosts of the VOC
May Joseph
The Dutch East India Company had over 600 entrepots across the Global South. Their destruction of coastal ecologies across the planet remains tangible – from New York City to Cape Town and Cochin. Today -those very locations are the most vulnerable locales of flooding and sinking ecologies. My talk will address the historical long duree implication of VOC colonization on today’s coastal and island cities. I will address how my work as a performance artist who uses an applied methodology of performance to engage with the violence of the VOC past, activates oceanic understanding to coastal and islands spaces across former VOC sites- Cochin, Kaap Staad (Cape Town), New Amsterdam (Manhattan), Amsterdam.
Oceanic approaches offer ways of connecting the historical pasts of colonization to the contemporary scenarios of species extinction and storm surge. My keynote presentation will explore how site specific immersive excavations of the VOC past allows a disinterring of forgotten stories, memories, family histories. It also brings into perspective the challenges of climate change for many of the lowest lying metropolitan cities in global Asia which comprise former VOC colonial outposts in the 17th century.
May Joseph is Founder of Harmattan Theater, Inc. an environmental theater company focusing on global water issues, based in New York City. Joseph is Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. Joseph has written widely on transnational cultural flows, and works on water ecology, global environmentalism, visual culture and critical ocean studies. She is the author of the ghosts of lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York; Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minnesota, 1999) and coeditor (with Jennifer Fink) of Performing Hybridity (Minnesota, 1999). Other edited volumes include Islands of Refuge (Island Studies, 2022); Transboundaries (Shima, 2023); Nomadic Identities (Island Studies Journal, 2021); Islands, History and Memory (Island Studies Journal, 2020); Coloniality and Islands (Shima 2019); Social Text # 124, Spring 2015; City Corps (Journal of Space and Culture), New Hybrid Identities (Women and Performance, 1995) and Bodywork (Women and Performance, 1999). Joseph has created site specific decolonial performances along Dutch and Portugese maritime routes. She is the editor of two book series, Critical Climate Studies (Routledge) and The Routledge Ocean and Island Studies Book Series (Routledge). www.mayjoseph.com
Artist talk:
Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands
Beatrice glow
In the 17th century Spice Wars, the Dutch and the English were fighting over the Banda Islands. They eventually signed the Treaty of Breda in 1667 wherein the Dutch traded Manhattan, for Rhun, one of the Banda Islands, also the First English colony: that was when New Amsterdam became New York. This exchange was intertwined with displacement, dispossession, and enslavement that shapes our present, and marked the violent rise of multinational corporations as in the process approximately 15,000 Bandanese were massacred by the Dutch East India Company in pursuit of dominating the nutmeg trade.
In thinking through the circulating undercurrents that connect the global archipelago through trade, oceanic and diasporic flows, multidisciplinary artist Beatrice Glow shares her research-creations on this chapter of the social history of plants, specifically the slow practice behind "Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands", a project that is working towards bridging Indigenous communities that continue to be impacted by this history to tell their own stories.
Beatrice Glow is an artist-researcher leveraging interactive multimedia installations and multi-sensory experiences in service of public history and just futures. Her diverse practice includes sculptural installations, participatory workshops, olfactory experiences, emerging media, and multi-lingual publishing. She often co-labors with scholars, scientists and community stakeholders to assemble surviving fragments and question colonialist histories. Her ongoing research into the social histories of plants sketches vignettes about the entangled realities of dispossession, enslavement, migrations and extractive economies. Her solo exhibitions include Forts and Flowers, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taiwan, 2019 and Aromérica Parfumeur, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile, 2016. She also was a participating artist in the Inaugural Honolulu Biennial, 2017. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Yale-NUS College Artist-in-Residence Programme, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, and the US Fulbright Scholar Program, amongst others.
Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea? Plebeian Demonology and Meta-geography in the Spanish Pacific
Kristie Flannery
On a hot August night in 1779 two Mexican soldiers found themselves sharing a small room in Manila’s Royal Hospital. José María Rodríguez guessed that he was twenty-one years old, and at thirty-seven, Josef Montoya was old enough to be his father. Together the men had made the long and arduous journey from Mexico City to the Philippines the previous year. As the monsoon rains beat down on the hospital’s roof, Rodríguez sat on Montoya’s sick bed and told him that he needed to confess a secret. The young man had enslaved his soul to Satan in Mexico City just before he set out on that epic transpacific journey. Rodríguez presented a scrunched up piece of paper — a contract of enslavement signed in his own blood— as proof of this exchange.
Can the devil cross the Pacific? Did a diabolic pact forged in Mexico matter in Manila, on the far side of the ocean? This article draws on the rich records of Inquisition’s investigations of Rodríguez to explore how the young soldier and the members of the multiethnic community that he inhabited in Manila imagined the transpacific, and the nature of the ties between Manila and Mexico. This attempt to recover and analyze the intellectual history of the Spanish Pacific from below makes an important contribution to recent interdisciplinary research that traces how elite Europeans and creole Mexicans “mapped America and Asia into a shared transpacific space.”
Dr. Kristie Flannery researches and writes about histories of empire in the early modern world. Her first book, under contract with U Penn Press, explores the intersection of piracy and the politics of Spanish colonial rule in maritime Asia and the Philippines. Kristie finished her PhD in History at UT Austin and held a Killam postdoctoral fellowship at UBC. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at ACU in Melbourne.