Sea Log

May Joseph is Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, where she teaches a walking history of coastal New York. Joseph is Founder of Harmattan Theater and has produced site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes. Joseph’s other books include Ghosts of Lumumba (2019), Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (2013) and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (1999).

• Introduction: Writing AnthropocenePreface: Decolonial PeriplusPart I1. Indian Ocean Affect2. Sea of Shock3. Ocean Ontologies 4. Contested VisualityPart II: Periplus5. Cochin, Dhow City6. Dar-Es-Salaam, Socialist Utopia7. Hanoi Palimpsest8. Bamiyan Pillage9. New York: Archipelagoes of the Unseen10. Deciphering the Indian Ocean

"May Joseph’s itinerary is singular but worldly, tending toward an otherworldliness where plenty bursts through colonial scarcities, where plenum pierces the One in everyone, where pleriplus is the genre of shared refuge in mobility. Her lyric, sharply analytic Sea Log is unprecedented and unanticipated in how it immediately establishes its absolute necessity. How else would we know how to sound the sound of the Indian Ocean as it washes New York shores?"- Fred Moten, Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts"Historically revealing, and politically attuned to the ongoing moment of decolonization, May Joseph’s Sea Log brings us to the Indian Ocean and its archive of colonial affects, brilliantly meeting the necessity for understanding the geopolitical crises of climate and environment. Taking us across coastal regions between Asia and Africa, Sea Log is an intimate and lyrical encounter with the other-than-human that also critically engages the inhuman. Powerful and poetic, this book is a moving rendition of what is lost and mourned, and what remains and inspires."- Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York