Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Migration and Displacement

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

4:00pm – 6:30pm

Joukowsky Forum, The Watson Institute

Histories of migrations have challenged nation-bound imaginaries of the world, with routes and networks reconfiguring our geographies of enquiry, and interrogating even the conventions of larger historical framings of empires and cold-war area-studies. Since globalization and with growing interest in histories of capitalism and climate change, global history and planetary thinking are pushing on the “world” in new ways.

This seminar takes the work of a historian of migrations and the Indian Ocean as a starting point for conversations. While Sunil Amrith will speak from his award-winning book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, and new trends in Indian Ocean historiography, he will be joined by interlocutors from around the “world,” from East Asia to the Mediterranean to the South Atlantic, to grapple with questions of “world-ing.”