Majda Atieh (Sultan Qaboos University)
Despite the end of colonization, global coloniality persists through enduring patterns of authority and influence that circulate social definitions of culture, social hierarchies, and even knowledge production, thus transcending the historical confines of colonial administration. Representing such controlling structures, museum archives conflate colonial mindsets that are embedded in frameworks dominated by Western perspectives to normalize ideas about political manipulation, cultural effacement, land control, and economic monopolization. These injustices often coalesce and intersect with the role of archiving, thereby posing a particular threat to the realization of sustainability and justice in the colonized area of the Global South. These internalized prejudices and injustices eventually serve to normalize inequality and limit the possibilities for genuine decolonisation process. In response, recent calls for disrupting these intrusive systems engage with the reframing of contemporary postcolonial and indigenous literatures as an ontological intervention in the museums’ neocolonial epistemicide that has been, in manifold ways, detrimental to the articulation of non-western voices and circulation of pluralistic worldviews. As an example, contemporary West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures feature postcolonial practices and indigenous underpinnings that viably suspend neocolonial museums’ archival praxis of western authority and erasure of nonwestern cultures. In particular, these literatures adopt a decolonial spatial turn, a cognizant shift toward regenerating indigenous epistemologies of nautical and maritime spaces as sustainable and autonomous documentation of local histories. As such, they situate the interrogation of the colonial encounter at the juncture of two distinct yet related fields of archival studies and transoceanic studies. In this regard, we invite papers that address how West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures regenerate the power of oceanic precarity that propels newer modes of decolonial resistance and resilience to interrogate and distrust the rigid structures that propagate epistemic violence and archival control. In particular, we are interested in how these literatures particularly shift the maritime space from a passive backdrop or metaphor to a potent agent that contributes to the re-formation and generative recovery of indigenous history, culture, and identity from archival epistemicide.
Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:
-Decolonial narration, archival regeneration, and maritime heritage and identity
- Reframing nautical narratives as counter challenge to dominant archival epistemologies
- Perduration of museums’ coloniality and the Oceanic Turn
-Marine archives and decolonial trajectories of interpretation
-Transoceanic archival paradigms and oceanic pluriverse
- Ontological sustainability of maritime heritage spaces
- Fluvial archives and restorative justice