On Monday, November 7th, Casa Árabe will present the conference "The Corporeal Life of Commerce at Sea", given by Laleh Khalili, professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London with the participation of Ángel Rodríguez García-Brazales, coordinator of the Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the UAM and director of the Master's Degree in Economic Intelligence and Geopolitics at the same university, Berta Álvarez-Miranda, lecturer in Sociology at the UCM, and Olivia Orozco, Casa Árabe's Training and Economics coordinator, who will moderate the session.
The conference is being held in collaboration with with the Bachelor in International Relations and the Master in European Union and the Mediterranean: historical, cultural, political, economic and social basis of the Complutense University Madrid and the Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics of the Autonomous University of Madrid. It is the third session of the Aula Árabe Universitaria 4 program, which can be seen live on our YouTube channel.
The everyday life of seafarers steaming across Arab seas and serving Arab ports today is shaped not only by their daily interactions with one another and with their officers (who are often of other nationalities), but also by the corporeal transformations they experience in their sensory relationship with the sea and the stars, the weather, and the technology around them. The body of the seafarer is the fulcrum upon which global and workplace asymmetries of power, long traditions and conventions of seafaring, and gendered and racialised subjectivities all conjoin in complex and unexpected ways.
The conference will speak not only of wages stolen and hunger ships managed by rapacious and unregulated shipping companies or the affective power of loneliness and loss at sea, but also the ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity forged aboard ships, and of the pleasures of arrival at ports. In focusing on the corporeal life of commerce at sea, we’ll pay heed to exhortations of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism to centre the lives of those forgotten or dismissed at the conjuncture of capital accumulation and raced and gendered hierarchies.
Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. In her first two books, Laleh has examined the representations and practices of violence. These two books are titled "Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration" (Cambridge 2007) and "Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency" (Stanford 2013). She has also co-edited a volume with Jillian Schwedler titled "Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion" (Hurst 2010) that also analyses the role of state violence in Middle Eastern politics. Her most recent book, "Sinews of War and Trade" (Verso 2020) examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. She is currently working on a larger project about the lifeworlds of petroleum. The project will range across the decades and continents to examine how the production of and trade in oil and gas has transformed regimes of labour and property, international law, insurance and finance, and science and technology.
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