Oceanic Imaginaries

ANTHRO 129C: A Deep Dive into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

AFRICAST 115: Excavating Enslavement
This is a project-based course, intended to scaffold a joint initiative, Aftermaths of Enslavement: curating legacies publicly. Both course and project seek to better understand enslaved pasts by (a) curating materials that advance scholarly research, using technologies that maximize access and utility; and (b) by developing learning materials for schools and popular audiences by working with heritage professionals and teachers. The focus is on the Indian Ocean World, particularly the Cape (South Africa) and Mauritius, within global and comparative frameworks. Readings for each week will juxtapose Cape and other slave systems. Project partners and other guests will join individual sessions. Students unable to attend the sessions should contact the instructor to discuss asynchronous alternatives.

GLOBAL 112: Oceans and the Global Imaginaries
This course brings together various social, climatic, and ecological perspectives to seek a better understanding of the relationships between people and the sea. Our oceans constitute some 70% of the surface area of our planet; they connect continents, countless islands, and form a universal link between geographically vast regions and culturally diverse peoples. Our oceans are critical to the health of our planet, and to humanity, and it is this interdependent relationship that forms the basis of this course.Taking a genuinely global viewpoint, we will explore the dynamic nature of peoples' interactions with their maritime landscape and seascape. The course will draw on a wide range of social science and natural science data and approaches to assess how we traversed and explored the seas; how the seas have been an enduring source of nutrition; and how they have come to garner immense social and cultural significance to peoples around the world. The course looks at the unique features of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, using case studies from each, while drawing lines that connect these vast oceanic basins. Ultimately, the course emphasizes the challenges facing our oceans as humanity's impact reaches unprecedented levels and considers how `people and oceans in partnership' might help mitigate the damage climate change has wrought on our planet.

BIO 71: Planet Ocean
Oceans make up the majority of our planet's area and living spaces and are fundamental to biodiversity, climate, food and commerce.This course covers integration of the oceanography, marine biology, policy and problem-solving for diverse ocean habitats such as the deep sea, coral reefs, open ocean, temperate coasts, and polar seas. Lectures include state of the art science of these areas, emerging technologies, policies for management and possible solutions to current problems. Discussion sections include how to read and interpret scientific papers, how to frame policy questions using science guidance, new technologies, and how to frame a pitch for a new solution to a current ocean problem.

HISTORY 8S: Whales, Bombs, & the Race to the Bottom: Oceanic Histories of Law, Environmentalism, & Human Rights
Oceans cover two thirds of the world's surface and play a vital role in global carbon storage, biodiversity, and food stocks. But who owns the oceans and their resources? And what rights and duties do countries, corporations, and individuals have at sea? In this course, we will examine histories of commercial fishing and whaling, nuclear testing, seabed mining, human rights at sea, and sea-level rise as avenues for understanding developments in international law over the course of the 20th century.

ILAC 218: Shipwrecks and Backlands: Getting Lost in Literature
This course takes students on a journey through tales of getting lost in the Portuguese and Spanish empires. We will read harrowing stories of being caught adrift at sea and mystical interpretations of island desertion. The course begins with sea-dominated stories of Portuguese voyages to Asia, Africa, and Brazil then turns to how the Amazon and the sertão, or backlands, became a driving force of Brazilian literature. Official historians, poets, and novelists imbued the ocean and the backlands with romanticism, yet these spaces were the backdrop to slavery and conquest. Instead of approaching shipwreck and captivity narratives as eyewitness testimonies, as many have, we will consider how they produced 'the sea' and 'the wilderness' as poetic constructions in Western literature while also offering glimpses of the 'darker side' of Iberian expansion. Taught in English with all texts offered both in English and the original Portuguese or Spanish. Optional guest lectures in Portuguese.

ANTHRO 129C: A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage. The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

COMPLIT 368A: Imagining the Oceans
How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park. Open to graduate students only.

GLOBAL 102: The Mamluks: Slave-Soldiers and Sultans of Medieval Egypt
Known as ghulam or mamluk in Arabic, the slave-soldier was a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of medieval Islam. Usually pagan steppe nomads, mamluks were purchased in adolescence, converted to Islam, taught Arabic, and trained to lead armies. Sometimes manumitted and sometimes not, in either case mamluks rose to positions of privilege and prominence in numerous regimes in the medieval Middle East.Nowhere was the mamluk institution so fundamental as it was in Egypt between 1250 and 1517 CE, when Cairo was ruled by these slave-soldiers, their ranks constantly renewed by imports of new mamluks from the Black Sea and Caucuses. Born in the age of the crusades and ultimately conquered by the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk Sultanate can be understood as a bridge between the worlds of medieval and early modern Islam, as well as between East and West, sitting astride the major Nile-Red Sea route that linked the Mediterranean world to that of the Indian Ocean and beyond. This class will investigate the rise and fall of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and its key roles in the commercial, diplomatic, and political history both of the medieval Middle East and the wider world.

HISTORY 81B: Making the Modern Middle East
This course aims to introduce students to major themes in the modern history of the region linking the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of the Middle East is required. We will begin with the Eurasian context that produced the Safavid and Ottoman empires and quickly move to the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century and imperial dissolution of the early twentieth. Twentieth-century themes will include mass migrations and colonial occupation; nationalism, mass politics and revolution; socialist and Islamist movements; and the growing role of American policy in the region. The course will conclude with a close examination of the profound transformations of the past decade, from the multiform uprisings of the 2010s to the equally multiform attempts to repress them.

Digitizing Justice in the Pacific

With support from Oceanic Imaginaries, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and the Center for East Asian Studies are digitizing records of the U.S. Navy’s prosecution of Japanese war criminals for crimes committed in the Pacific during World War II. Once complete, the collection will join the Virtual Tribunals website, an online archive of international criminal justice records.

The project has already inspired new scholarship, including Stanford student Lindsey McKhann’s capstone on the Navy trials, and researcher Michael Eastman’s award-winning essay on the prosecutions, which will appear in Naval History.

Indonesian Ocean Justice Initiative

In 2017, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) and leading tuna sector companies pledged to eliminate modern slavery from supply chains. A multidisciplinary team, combining Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions' (COS) fisheries expertise and Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice's (CHRIJ) human rights knowledge, collaborates with the Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative (IOJI) and Fifty-Eight to develop an exploitation-fighting platform that endeavors to address contract and payment issues highlighted in direct interviews of Indonesian workers. The team works with three large tuna companies – Bumble Bee, Thai Union, and Starkist– to test and refine usability of the platform by key stakeholder groups, achieve buy-in and uptake among the various parties in the pre-processing segment of the supply chain, and pave the way for scalability and transferability to other sectors and geographies.

Under Pressure: Microbial Carbon Sequestration in the Deep North Atlantic Ocean 

PIs: Anne Dekas, Department of Earth System Science; Christian Tamburini, Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography, Marseille

Microorganisms living in the deep sea have the potential to play important roles in shaping global chemistry and climate by producing and consuming greenhouse gases and cycling nutrients required for all marine life. However, the activity and physiology of these cells are poorly characterized to date, largely due to sample inaccessibility and the technical challenges of maintaining pressure-adapted, slow-growing microorganisms in the laboratory. This project leverages a French sampling expedition to the North Atlantic Ocean and recently developed sampling and analysis technologies to study the metabolism and activity of deep-sea microorganisms. Specifically, we will measure growth rates of individual deep-sea cells and characterize their metabolisms while maintaining in situ pressure. Our hypothesis is that deep-sea microbial activity, and specifically chemoautotrophy (a metabolism analogous to photosynthesis but in the dark), has been underestimated to date and therefore inaccurately represented in global models. Our experiments will provide new insights into the biology and the chemistry of the deep sea, and therefore the limits of life on Earth and the potential for deep-sea microbes to mitigate climate change. American and French scientists and students will work together in sampling, experiments, analysis, and manuscript preparation as part of this work. This project is funded by Stanford Global Studies and the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.