SYMPOSIUM: MIDDLE PASSAGES: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process, An interdisciplinary symposium

Convenors: Professor Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburg

Professor Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania, Australia

Sponsored by the International Centre for Convict Studies and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia, the symposium will be hosted by the Western Australia Maritime Museum in Fremantle (near Perth), Australia. Located in a working port on the Indian Ocean, this dynamic institution offers a vibrant maritime atmosphere.

The conference will build on a highly successful predecessor, "Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, c. 1500 – c. 1900," which was held at the University of Greifswald, Germany, in July, 2000.

The aim of this international conference is to explore the social and cultural transformations caused by the transport of labor, unfree and free, around and across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Our definition of the ocean includes riverine and other hydrographic systems that connect to it.

We seek to investigate, compare, and connect the experiences of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, political prisoners, sailors, and migrants of all kinds, and to consider ships as places where their struggles have made history.

We take our title from the infamous African slave trade. Abolitionists made the middle passage an enduring symbol of degradation – brutality, inhumanity, suffering, and death – but we now begin to understand that between the decks of these vessels of howling misery lay creativity, something new: the origins of defiant, resilient, life-affirming African-American and Afro-Caribbean cultures. This contradictory epitome can help to illuminate other middle passages in which the oceanic voyage was the structuring link between expropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another.

The conference builds on, and hopes to expand, exciting new scholarship on the diverse men and women who labored and traveled in ships around the world, often forced from their home and family to work in strange new lands. Within an interdisciplinary forum we will ask these questions:

*How did middle passages affect those who made them?

*How did they shape their understanding of themselves and their relations to others?

*How did ships function as transnational contact zones?

*How did ships and middle passages serve an expanding system of global capitalism?

*How do the national histories of America and other new world societies look when viewed not from the vantage of settlers on land but rather migrants aboard transoceanic ships?