Join us for the 7th session of the Economics Histories of the Global South Seminar Series hosted by Rethinking Economics International, Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism: Voices from MENA (American University in Cairo, Egypt) and WITS Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa).
We will be discussing Laleh Khalili’s book, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, published by Mack Books in 2024. With the onslaught of US-Israel’s war on Iran and from the dead and displaced to the shock delivered to the global economy, this session is especially relevant now as it throws light on the most vulnerable unit in the monstrous world of maritime capitalism.
About the book:
The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital essay, scholar Laleh Khalili draws on her ongoing research and experiences of travelling on cargo ships to explore the embodied life of these labourers. She investigates an experience riddled with adversities – loneliness, loss, and violence, stolen wages and exploitative shipowners – as well as ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity. In the unique arena of the ship, Khalili traces the many forms of corporeality involved in work at sea and the ways the body is engaged by the institutions that engulf seafarers’ lives and work.
This book takes in both scholarly and literary accounts to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea. Drawing on the insights of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism, it centres the lives of those so often forgotten or dismissed in enterprises of capital accumulation and the raced and gendered hierarchies that shape them.
Author & Speaker:
Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter and is a internationally-renowned expert on the oil industry, global trade and geopolitics in the Gulf region. Throughout her scholarly career, she has been compelled with and curious about the workings of transnational movements: of colonial forms of power and violence, of resistance, of ideas and practices, of people, and now of capital and cargo. Her books include Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020), Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge, 2027), Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Profile Books, 2025).
Discussants:
Sharad Chari is a Professor of Geography at University of California at Berkeley. His book Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023) reads Italian militant Antonio Gramsci’s notes on maritime themes to offer a critique of terraqueous capitalism and imperialism, and it reads archives of oceanic struggle with Black arts to argue that multiple forms of critique might yet storm different shores. His other book include Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford and Permanent Black, 2004), Apartheid Remains (Duke and UKZN Press, 2024) among others. One of his current project inlcude the contradictory hopes of accumulation and ocean defense through the “blue economy” in the Southern African Indian Ocean.
Miriam Matthiessen is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam currently working on an ethnographic research project about inland shipping across the Rhine-Scheldt Delta. Her writing has been published by the Journal of Urban Political Ecology, Sonic Acts, Weird Economies, and the Contested Ports Project. Together with Jacob Bolton, she is part of Liquid Time, an artist-research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds. Since 2021, she co-runs and maintains the Abandoned Seafarer Map with Jacob Bolton and Eliza Ader.
For attendees –
1. Please check the start time for your timezone here. The session at 8 pm IST | 4:30 pm SAST | 5:30 EET | 4:30 PM CAT | 2:30 pm UTC | 7:30 am PDT.
2. This seminar series is open to public and will be conducted as a Zoom Webinar.
3. Attendees can ask questions through the Q&A box. Visit our YouTube page for previous sessions in the series.