Bio: Dr. Renisa Mawani is
Professor of Sociology and recurring Chair of the Law and Society Program at
the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical theory
and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and
legal geography. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (2009) details a
set of legal encounters between indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants,
“mixed-race” populations, and Europeans in late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Her second book, Across Oceans of
Law (Duke University Press, 2018), is a global and maritime legal history
of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese-owned
steamship. Drawing on oceans as method, the book traces the vessel’s
1914 route across the Pacific and Indian Oceans and figuratively through
Atlantic worlds. With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law:
Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014);
with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Imperial Bestiary
of Our Times (under contract with Duke University Press). In 2015-2016, she
received the Killam Prize for Graduate Instruction, a Dean of Arts Faculty
Research Award, and was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced
Studies
Abstract: In her new book, Across Oceans of
Law, Dr. Renisa Mawani draws on what she terms “oceans as method” – a mode of
thinking and writing that repositions land and sea – to examine the historical
and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration in maritime
worlds. By following the movements of the famous Komagata Maru, she
traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests over
the so-called free sea and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal
history. Oceans as method, Mawani argues, may be one way to write against the
spatial, temporal, and epistemic divides between India and the diaspora.
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