In Gramsci at Sea, author Sharad Chari asks how the environmental crisis of the oceans is linked to legacies of capitalism and imperialism across and within the oceans. Chari reads Antonio Gramsci as a thinker of the oceanic crisis, drawing on the philosopher’s prison notes and questions concerning waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Here, Chari is joined in conversation with Charne Lavery, Melissa Marschke, and Philippe Le Billon.
Sharad Chari is associate professor of geography and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital.
Charne Lavery is senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She is author of Writing Ocean Worlds.
Melissa Marschke is professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is author of Life, Fish and Mangroves.
Philippe Le Billon is professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Wars of Plunder.
Persons and works referenced:
-Fernando Coronil
-The Many-Headed Hydra by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh
-Meg Samuelson, “Thinking with Sharks,” Australian Humanities Review
In Gramsci at Sea, author Sharad Chari asks how the environmental crisis of the oceans is linked to legacies of capitalism and imperialism across and within the oceans. Chari reads Antonio Gramsci as a thinker of the oceanic crisis, drawing on the philosopher’s prison notes and questions concerning waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Here, Chari is joined in conversation with Charne Lavery, Melissa Marschke, and Philippe Le Billon.
Sharad Chari is associate professor of geography and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital.
Charne Lavery is senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She is author of Writing Ocean Worlds.
Melissa Marschke is professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is author of Life, Fish and Mangroves.
Philippe Le Billon is professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Wars of Plunder.
Persons and works referenced:
-Fernando Coronil
-The Many-Headed Hydra by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh
-Meg Samuelson, “Thinking with Sharks,” Australian Humanities Review
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Sharad Chari:
Perhaps she would never give up the possibility of political hope. He's interested in the the conjunctural possibilities that emerge, you know, even in the most dire situations.
Narrator:
Gramsci at Sea is a succinct book that reads Antonio Gramsci's writings on the sea, focused on his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the interwar oceans of his time. Author Sherid Chari argues that the imprisoned militants method is oceanic in form and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to oceanic crisis, to the royal of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, and to the capacity of black, Drexian, and other forms of oceanic critique to storm us on different shores. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Sian Lavery, Melissa Marshka, and Felipe Le Bayonne.
Charne Lavery:
Hi. We're all here to discuss Sian Lavery's Gramsci at Sea. And I think we're all gonna introduce ourselves. My name is Sian Lavery, and I am a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and I have known Sharad for almost ten years.
Melissa Marschke:
I'm Melissa Marashka. I'm at the University of Ottawa. I'm a professor in development studies. Delighted to be here and have known Shrad for four months now.
Philippe Le Billon:
Hello. My name is Philippe Lebion. I'm a professor at the University of, British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. And, I've been in contact with Sharad a lot, earlier this year. And before that, we we had met, I would say about seven years ago.
Philippe Le Billon:
So it's a pleasure to be back.
Sharad Chari:
Thank you all. And I'm, Sharad Charad. I'm the author of Crunchy at Sea. And it's an incredible privilege to be in conversation with Sean, Melissa, and Philippe also because they are so invested in the various aspects of the material this book engages. We have also been, all of us, fellows at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies this past year, which is where three of us are, and one of us is in his heart.
Sharad Chari:
So lovely to be in conversation with all of you.
Charne Lavery:
So, Sharad, you have finished this book. It's about to come out. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to write the book? And another way of saying that is I kinda wanted to know, a bit about what is Gramsci to you, or who is Gramsci to you and also for that matter the sea.
Sharad Chari:
Those are three big questions, and they're also they're at the heart of it. Thanks for that. Okay. So I came to write this book. I was asked to do a set of lectures at the University of Bologna, which were in a summer school on the sea last year, Northern Hemisphere summer.
Sharad Chari:
I did a set of lectures on Gramsci and oceanic extraction, and that was the impetus for writing this short book for forerunners, and forerunners was the ideal place to get it out in the world quickly. It builds on the two things you just mentioned, why Ramshy is interesting to me and to many people, What's interesting about Ramshy and what we're all in different ways puzzling over how to grasp and grapple with the many dimensions of the oceanic crisis, which is also the planetary crisis or a window into the planetary crisis. So Gramsci stands for the hope of bringing together materialist analysis and cultural critique in a synthetic way. That's one key reason that, people have time and again gone to Gramsci, read Gramsci again. Another thing that I always think about in Gramsci is that Gramsci as a Marxist always is reading Marx and is always attentive to the practice of reading and rereading Marx.
Sharad Chari:
And there's something else that I stumbled into. There's been a major shift in Gramsci studies over the last few decades, which is of reading Gramsci as he says, philologically, reading along his notes and reading along themes in the notes. And I just stumbled into well, I searched for the now that we can search for things online. I searched for his notes on the sea. And and also imagined that had he been in our writing today, his notes would have been hyperlinked and he wouldn't think of this as a kind of sea of notes.
Sharad Chari:
So they are kind of bizarrely interlinked. But his notes on maritime matters are really interesting, and they recast his own thought in all sorts of ways. They take him out of a nation centric box. They take him into thinking about overlapping and intersecting empires, which is a theme in his work. He's sort of a very much of a recursive thinker.
Sharad Chari:
He's about all about how the past is revived in the present. These elements, I think, come together in what I think is an oceanic method in his thought. And I think that becomes apparent through his notes on the scene. Should we say anything more about Gramsci before we get into the sea
Melissa Marschke:
maybe? Yeah. So I understand the sea more than I understand Gramsci. And so I found your book absolutely fascinating to read because I the sea part, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I was stepping back to think about what Gramsci meant.
Melissa Marschke:
And so I'd love to know about what Gramsci means to you and then thinking about his, oceanic metaphors and writing.
Sharad Chari:
Yeah. So back to the notes on this. There are particular notes that are headed. You know, the the sub the headings of the notes give you a clue about how he thought they might be read. And there's one ex really exciting note about the emergence of, Pax Americana, you know, The US imperial power in Grubishi's writing in the fascist prison in the thirties and forties and imagining this sort of shifting imperial fortunes in that moment.
Sharad Chari:
And he's already been thinking about what's landed him in this prison, and he's thinking about waves of revolutions and counter revolutions, interconnected waves of revolutions and counter revolutions from the French revolution to the formation of its lead to the kind of end of the possibility of a progressive nationalist project to the rise of Mussolini, none with any inevitability. And I said, you know, these are kind of like waves and they are like waves and it's thought. He says early on that when we think of a thinker, we should pay attention to their leitmotifs, their forms of thought. Again, very humanities kind of way of thinking, you know, that we we should think about the form of thought. As social scientists, we tend to kind of think of Grampesh as a thinker about certain concepts, but his forms of thought are really interesting.
Sharad Chari:
And that's what I'm turning to. There's a note on method where he says, this is how we could think about we wanna get away from a kind of structuralist Marxism where there's a kind of stratigraphy, a kind of materialist base somewhere under underground and cultural political stuff on the surface. It's much more turgid, much more you know, and I'm I'm rolling my hands around as if it kind of an act, a metaphor, royal of kind of turgid waters and be something like that. It's much more liquid. That's what I think is possible.
Sharad Chari:
So there there are these metaphors in it right. He writes about things that are happening on the surface, waves on the surface, and deep currents below. He's interesting in our moment around okay. Let's shift a little bit to thinking about the sea itself. Oceanic studies is oceanic.
Sharad Chari:
There's so many things that people think of in this broad field, which is what makes it exciting. It's also a place of real possibility and thinking synthetically about where we are and not in in planetary terms. You know, the oceanic crisis is the planetary crisis. But from Ramesh, first of all, the first one point is that the method is much more turbulent in its way of thinking about political economy and cultural process, let's say, or representation. That's one aspect.
Sharad Chari:
It's something that, of course, people have always thought about Brent and Branchy, but the oceanic notes, I think, take us closer to it. And also they take us closer to these cycles or currents of imperial process. And then in, you know, in chapter two and three of the book, chapter one is really about reading Branchy. Chapter two and three take us into the oceanic question. Granshey asks, how do we think about the plight of the Italian south?
Sharad Chari:
Maybe we think, you know, how do we think about the plight of the oceans? Something that all of you work on with the noise. And I bring into that one of the inspirations there, one of the citations there is to the agrarian questions, to the importance of thinking about the agrarian question as an approach to studying capitalism, imperialism, where nature and land matter and shape outcomes. And I think in analogously, I'm trying to draw the insights of the agrarian question literature. And something that, Felipe, I wonder what you would think about that, but it's like I do kind of say that this is where an an oceanic approach to the agrarian question, an aquarium question, that might be, more precise than some of the recent work on extractivism or the industry work on Bluetongue, certainly, but the activist work on extractivism.
Philippe Le Billon:
Yeah. That's right, Jared. I was wondering a major effort at the moment is to re people, the sea. The sea often is seen in many metaphors as being empty, as being this other big void, the waves, the currents, those are types of, physical entities, strong materiality. But the sociality of the sea and, you know, the relationship of people with the sea and the sea with people, sometimes does not really appear.
Philippe Le Billon:
So in Gramsci's work, the one that you cite, at least the mariners make a little apparition. And also, it's a relationship between the sea, the sea creatures, and what does that tell us about the diversity of life and the beauty of life in particular when he talks to his son. So maybe peopling the sea, through, you know, humans and non humans. How do you see Gramsci, kind of engaging with that?
Sharad Chari:
That's right. Peopling, enlivening. Gramsci calls his materialism he says he's interested in absolute earthliness of thought. That's something he says somewhere, which I think if we think of, you know, with most of the planet, that's also thinking about the liveliness of the ocean as part of this, however we think of the oceanic question. And peopling is only part of the tip of the iceberg as you noted just now.
Sharad Chari:
There is that element in the social history of the oceans around mariners, seafarers, mariners, Linebaugh and Rediker's amazing book, The Many Headed Hydra, and all the other texts that, you know, on oceanic fishing. And Melissa's been doing amazing work that is bringing the labor question in a fundamental way.
Melissa Marschke:
I'm putting my hand up here because I I really want you to talk about, you have this great quote in the book about pelagic imperialism and you start to unpack and you talk about the fact that the ocean further depleting is linked to this labor exploitation but also fisheries exploitation. So I wondered if you could talk a bit more about pelagic imperialism.
Sharad Chari:
Well, I mean, you're an expert on this topic. In this book, I draw on insights from quite a lot of work, and I think that what you're citing is Kampling and Kolas' capitalism in the sea. And there, I've been given Liam Kampling's work and and yours and the importance of bringing the fisheries industry into the the frame. Right? Often something that's, forgotten.
Melissa Marschke:
Well, yeah. I think labor is often not even included as part of readings of the ocean. I often labour the work that piece is often missing so for me that was really interesting that you were able to bring that in as you started thinking and that makes sense because you're talking about Ranche and there's a labour piece to what he does and so to me that was exciting to see how you've made these connections.
Charne Lavery:
Yeah. But, I mean, what you've said, Melissa, in your work is, you know, actually, we do think often about the tuna and less about the fishermen. On the one hand, there's been a movement in the oceanic studies to be thinking about the ocean as an environment, which I think in your book also, Sharad, you say the environmentalization of the ocean in this time. But it is an important way in which the book, in addition to Melissa's work and, in fact, Philippe's work, is bringing back people and labor and questions of justice into the question of the oceanic.
Sharad Chari:
Yes. I mean, I think that's right. I think that chapter three actually, which is trying to refuse a kind of abstract notion of land, labor, and capital and the dance of these three ghostly figures, well, the of Mercilla Capital and Madame Lothair. That comes from Marx and Marx in volume three of Capital critiquing the idea that mainstream economists' idea that these abstractions dance around in the air. And, of course, they are anchored in real struggles with real people and real animals and real environments.
Sharad Chari:
And there that's the lively materiality that, Ramshy is invested in. And there's another aspect to that, which is that the social history of the oceans has focused to some degree on oceanic labor on the surface. And one of the questions is, how do we take this under the below the waterline? And that's been one of the questions that so some people have gone into deep sea divers and the scientists who go underwater and then all that stuff, coral reefs
Charne Lavery:
and Pearl diving.
Sharad Chari:
Pearl diving and all these sorts of other people aspect of the undersea. And your questions in your own work has also been about going beyond the human eye, but to the depths that's better beyond our human experience. Right? And but not beyond human imagination or politics. And that's consistent with what the attempt in that chapter three is to say, if there's something that we can learn from the critique of Eurocentrism, occidentalism, in thinking beyond a terra centric or even surface conception of, you know, a peopled capitalism, a peopled imperialism and struggles in that level.
Sharad Chari:
What does that mean? For me, these are this book opens questions rather than you know? So this is and these are questions that we're all invested in. But I I think the the liveliness of the sea and struggles over that liveliness are at the core of that.
Charne Lavery:
I I have a question about this, which which which I'm gonna also quote from the book, which is that in a couple of places, both in the introduction to the book and in chapter three, you talk about an analogy between the northern or terrestrial self
Sharad Chari:
Yes.
Charne Lavery:
As distinct from the southern or oceanic other.
Sharad Chari:
Yes.
Charne Lavery:
And another place in the book, you ask how might we attend to terraqueous territorialities and structure the feeling without lapsing into a background of teracentrism? Yes. A land sea binary is not unlike a west rest or self other binary distinction. And so what the book seems to be doing is to be posing kind of a parallel between land north south and sea south other and linking kind of the sea to the south. So I I wanted to know if that's kind of what you were doing and maybe how this links to, like, the South Of Italy slash the Southern Hemisphere slash the global South.
Charne Lavery:
Yeah. And so what's kind of southern about the oceanic?
Sharad Chari:
So it's interesting. Gramsci himself points out to his own childhood taunt about throwing the mainlanders into the sea, which is we know that in Southern Africa too. It's, it throw the settlers into the sea, which is a southern anti colonial position in in Italy that he grew up with, but a kind of crude one that he then instead of refines and transforms this is his oceanic thought, his constant revision of his forms of thinking. And he has a much more subtle formulation later on, which the point is is not simply redress of the South or redress of the oceans. It's upending the work of the binary that has been part of waves of pelagic imperialism, waves of oceanic imperialism in general.
Sharad Chari:
So Fernando Cornel's critique in that beginning of that chapter, he tries to read ways in which the self other West dress binary is mobilized in different attempts at a kind of anti Eurocentric form of thought, which preserves that binary. And I kind of said suggest that conversation between Marcus Rediker and and and some ways Meg Samuelson's response to Marcus Rediker about the shark Yeah. Which I thought was just amazing. Her way of reading the Damien Hirst shark in relation to the charts of the of the slave trade. That constellation of ideas is opening up something, I think.
Philippe Le Billon:
Another question was a little bit about the digitalization of the ocean, the mobilization of the ocean, the robotization of operation on the ocean. You know, what what does that tell us also about this, idea of surplus population, of deep peopling again the sea, making this kind of abstraction of labor and people and, you know, preparing in in a way the ocean to be, fully exploited, having, you know, levels of extractivism that become detached from the possibilities of social struggles precisely because they are seen as an impediment potentially. Even if, you know, the the the class of professionals employed at sea, as you know, there there are many different ones. You know, some are highly exploited, others have, amazing packages in order to, perform their their work.
Sharad Chari:
One of the things I find useful about thinking with Gramsci is that he he's always attentive to how things come together in particular conjunctures, spatially and temporally. I don't attend to the digital ocean, that I should say that, and its effects. It is an important question. It is it isn't something that I attend to adequately, But I I do a little bit. I do a little bit.
Sharad Chari:
But I I guess this method would say we still have to look at the specific conjunctural situations. In all these chapters, actually, I wouldn't Gramsci wouldn't Gramsci at sea, wouldn't make a blanket argument about what the digital ocean portends in some of the ways I think you have characterized Snow. You know, Melissa's been working on on seafarers trapped in forms of unfree labor and fishing boats who could use some connection to the digital ocean to to convey the in fact, their roots as discernible through the through the digitization of the ocean tell us where they've been, how long they've been away. So there are lots of aspects. And, Ramesh, you would say, where are the tools of struggle here?
Sharad Chari:
And I think your work is actually pointing to the political use of some aspects of the digital ocean, including, you know, seafarers' ability or not to communicate while at sea, for long periods, stuck at sea under miserable conditions.
Melissa Marschke:
And I also think you actually might not talk about digitization as much as a tool of struggle, but you bring in ideas of struggle. So you have ideas from agrarian studies, you have ideas for racial capitalism, all to help unpack the oceanic and what's emerging at sea. So I'm wondering if you could talk a bit more about how you draw on both agrarian studies and racial capitalism to help us better understand and puzzle through the oceanic and gram chain.
Sharad Chari:
Thanks. That that that's something that I puzzle through in general, but here I actually point to in in that second chapter some work from the Grandmaster tradition that has been doing something that is consistent with the expectation in the word racial capitalism, which is that prior forms of power, authority, inequality through race and through other means are imported into and conserved in the making of particular configurations of capitalism. And that's very much consistent with Ramche's method. Ramche's always always interested in conjunctures where elements of the past persist and shape the present. And in a couple of texts that I point to, wonderful work by Matt Schutzer, mining in North India, Gavin Katz in, South Africa.
Sharad Chari:
Anyway, that that that work that shows how prior social institutions are drawn into reconstitutions of agrarian capitalism. You know, and my question was, is can we look at points into the diversity of labor regimes that we just pointed to earlier, you know, that persist, and free laborers still persist in all sorts of forms. The people's ocean is is incredibly differentiated. This is a question, I think, that the the way I would bring the great question into thinking about the people notion in that way is to think about how these prior forms are part of you know making this incredibly unequal equal speed. I think that's the general lesson of racial capitalism and that's what the black studies work tends to think of more about consciousness and about representation.
Sharad Chari:
When the agrarian literature, I think, gets more into the material conditions and less into the cultural and, you know, representational side of it, We don't think as much about the present stream of
Charne Lavery:
Can I actually, bring I think we can move recursively across the chapters? There's a a meta method here where you're reading Gramsci as having this recursive and oceanic method Yes. In in his own work, but also that's the way in which you're reading him in this book, I think. I mean, one of the things the book does, which I just wanted to mention is, you know, you mentioned that the the the field of oceanic studies is oceanic in size. And one of the things the book does is kind of via these this conjuncture of Gramsci and and the oceanic is is kind of map out the field.
Charne Lavery:
There's quite a lot of of terrain mapping to say this is through this kind of micro window onto the field. Here's the is the wider field out there. But I wanted to ask you in particular about questions of your method. And there's places in in the book in which you flag your method, and one of it, is less, like, dialogic or conversational. So you say, you know, what you wanna achieve in the book is a conceptualization of the oceanic question adequate to the present with Gramsci as a proximal interlocutor.
Charne Lavery:
And I wondered if you wanted to talk a bit about that, like, about using Gramsci as an interlocutor, so as as a kind of conversationalist in in your thinking through these questions, and or the ways in which, as you were saying, you have actually quite a you call it humanities method, but it's a literary method. It's a kind of close reading of Gramsci and texts, which then in chapter four becomes realized in a kind of close reading of artwork of both arts, literature, Moby Dick, Ellen Gallagher, and and the other artists and writers that you mentioned.
Sharad Chari:
Well, a lot of that is thanks to you, Sean. Thanks to the education that you have offered. Gramsci lends himself to reading, as I said, because he himself is always you know, he's stuck in a prison. He has a few passages from Marx. If he calls himself the Marxist, he has a few, but he keeps going back to them and rereading and reinterpreting and thinking with them.
Sharad Chari:
He does these seemingly kind of plotted histories of the French Revolution, but then they're meant to be ways of rereading and rethinking and revising. So he isn't invested in reading in a certain way. So when I think with him as an interlocutor, that's what I mean. It's sort of thinking with that, the possibilities in that form of thought as a Marxist as well. You know, as a Marxist who's still convinced that we have to understand how capitalism works, but not in a mechanistic way and always attentive to conjunctural possibilities and struggles and the artists and also reread reading Moby Dick, through a kind of black critical lens, which you also pushed me to do by taking Pip seriously.
Sharad Chari:
Pip poo falls into the ocean somewhere near the streets of Malacca. And we know from Sean's work actually that Pequod has moved through the in the ocean as the ocean, through the Indian Ocean.
Charne Lavery:
And And the Indian Ocean in particular.
Sharad Chari:
The Indian Ocean as in its oceanic materiality, seeing all these creatures and also the the whales giving birth and all that. And then Pip falls in and sees something horrific and becomes the kind of crazed person who can see the truth. He is in that sense a a kind of incredible figure to think with, and he's a crucial figure for Ellen Gallagher also. The artist you've got me to engage your work carefully. Catherine McKittrick is the other figure who reads, Helen Gallagher with Drexia and tries to think about this black aqua futurist work as a kind of different kind of critical archive.
Sharad Chari:
And the one of the exciting things is that Drexia,
Charne Lavery:
this It's a long backstory.
Sharad Chari:
So it's a long backstory that can be summarized as what? This band that is fiercely anti commercial or not band, the kind of the DJ is really work, fiercely anti commercial emerging from the ruins of Fortis, Detroit. For so in the aftermath of Gramsci's reading of this particular space from a distance as an archetype of, American capitalism, which he doesn't read as racial capitalism, in fact, because he doesn't read the Negro question question which circulated around him in that time. In the aftermath of that, in the ruins of that, emerges this electronica duo who I think pick up the question, and they pick up the question through this notion of the storm. They they think of their musical events as grasping conjunctural opportunities in various places and stoking them.
Sharad Chari:
That's the kind of political hope that I think connects back to Gramsci. With Gramsci is just as, you know, Philippe, you asked about when you asked about the digital ocean. Gramsci would never give up the possibility of political hope. He's interested in the the conjunctural possibilities that emerge, you know, even in the most dire situation sitting in Mussolini's prison. And then he is sitting in Mussolini's prison thinking about folklore as, you know, the source of hope.
Sharad Chari:
He writes to his family and Sardinia to tell him to send him childhood folklore and story, you know, fairy tales and things like that to look for the seeds of hope, seeds of change. So we think similarly about the oceanic western, when Drexia imagines a black undersea utopia, and they create these storms, these events of musical events that are unplanned and anti commercial. There's something there that Drexia read with Gallagher, Pip, John O'Komfrah, gives us a way of thinking about constellations of political hope, I think, of or of political transformation in dire situations, which we face all over the world and seen through the oceans. And so when we turn to thinking about struggles in the ocean, we tend to think sequentially about the origins of the strike and of the abolitionism and, you know, the movements against abolition across the world and making up a global color line across the oceans. Also, the struggles over the ocean itself, the legal struggles around, deep sea, the importance of third world lawyering in that domain.
Sharad Chari:
And at the end of that, are the struggles of all these moments ever over? I don't think we can ever say that. Melissa here is working on on the ongoing struggles of unfree labor here in Cape Town. And the archives of of Oceanic struggle are never passed. They're always with us.
Sharad Chari:
This is what I, you know, throw caution to the wind and say in the end. There's always the possibility that they might come together in particular ways and in ways we can't yet anticipate.
Philippe Le Billon:
Talking about things we cannot anticipate, at the moment, there's a lot of work being done to try to get some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, citizens, to, speak in, in a language that we can, understand through translation. I'm just wondering what is the place of, non humans in, reviving this this hope and maybe learning a little bit of the vernacular, and, the folkloric tales that, you know, where world groups are exchanging. We know they are. We know they are telling stories to each other. You know, is that something that could open us form of hope, in the twenty first century when, you know, we'll be able to talk to those, extraterrestrial and oceanic creatures.
Sharad Chari:
We have to, right, in some way imagine collective for Grumpy, you know, the question is how do we imagine the articulation of collective political will? And that has has to be to think about the oceanic crisis, it has to be human and non human. Gramsci, Anit has if his materialism takes us into an, you know, an earthly form, whether that means, decoding the folklore of the Whales. Whales. And I think there's space for thinking on this.
Sharad Chari:
What does it mean without anthropomorphism?
Charne Lavery:
Or centrism.
Sharad Chari:
Or centrism as morphism.
Charne Lavery:
You do actually end the book with a reference to Pip, what he sees, that he's sort of kind of floating at the sea surface and what Pip sees or experiences is a sense of this intense liveliness of the sea beneath him. There's an intense mysterious multitudinous and very strange. In some ways, it may drive him mad. Yes. Or as you put it, Pip might be the Gramsciyan organic intellectual of the oceanic crisis as a result.
Charne Lavery:
So maybe it's a kind of informed sort of madness. And and later on in the same paragraph, you said, Gramsci returns to the radical traditions of the shipwreck with Pip and political hope. Yes. And there's something quite tricky about thinking about the creatures who were trying to learn their language and how decimated their populations are already, along with the overfishing that even the fishermen that Melissa is working with are very much aware of, that their own jobs are at risk because of the increasing lack of fish in the sea. So there's quite a lot of reasons to not to to be thinking shipwreck as as opposed to hope.
Charne Lavery:
Yes. Yes. And maybe this is, you know, it's the it's the note your your book ends on, but I wanted you to maybe just say a bit more about this, like, how Gramsci helps us to think both shipwreck and hope
Sharad Chari:
at the
Charne Lavery:
same time.
Sharad Chari:
Well, he got he had that, the famous line from Omar Hola. What is it? Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Mhmm. So, you know, you can work with the tragic mode, but tragedy doesn't foretell its, in fact, they're the all the great writers of tragedy have been opening up the contradictions.
Sharad Chari:
Right? Helping us think about Caliban or helping us think with these figures. Pip is like a, like, little hidden gem in Moby Dick. You're right. There's a lot of speculation about what this you know, whether Pip was an enslaved young black cabin boy on the ship.
Sharad Chari:
But captain Ahab, this kind of crazed Trump like, whatever whatever he is, kind of megalomaniac figure bent on taking this ship to its destruction in pursuit of the whatever the white whale is meant to signify a whole know, body work on this. Pip is the figure, the only character he listens to after Pip falls into the ocean, the only person on the ship who's still a person, not quite a person. It's also across the human, nonhuman boundary in a way. You know, maybe he is the figure that also that Philippe you're pointing to, who can listen to the stories of the whales. We don't need to decode it, that that's that kind of figure.
Sharad Chari:
Empathy and not in a humanist way, in a kind of revolutionary way. That's the Prussian organic intellectual that that we might read in Pip. Akonfrat is an interesting figure because his vertigo c reads in multiple screens, melting ice. These figures, you know, like, Aquiano gazing out, active melting ice. Aquiano when he has been free a freed slave now beholding the Arctic.
Sharad Chari:
Right? He goes on the Arctic expedition. Virginia Wolf and, you know, easing out of the sea. I love that aspect. And but, you know, trying to think intertextually, but also beyond the text as we know it.
Sharad Chari:
Right? Because the the environmental aspect of a confra takes us back in a way to Philippe's question. How do we actually reap the scale of destruction? Melissa, you know, fighting for justice or seafarers, trapped on fishing ships, data pittance, working under conditions of impermanent freedom, chasing fish that are being deflated, destroyed, chasing a fishery in the process of destruction.
Charne Lavery:
And we should say fighting for Wi Fi on boats.
Sharad Chari:
Fighting for Wi Fi. All the elements of the conjuncture matter. All the political battles matter. So that that that we we can't find the kind of second coming in one place. That's also Gramscian.
Sharad Chari:
Right? We find the political battles that fit in a particular. That's what I think the black app of futurists help us think with sites of political
Melissa Marschke:
hope. Yeah. I think it's a really lovely way to end the book actually is on that note of hope. It's quite inspirational actually to see how one might think about the future through Pramsci, and your focus on Black aquafuturism really intrigued me. It was very original, actually.
Melissa Marschke:
The first three chapters I understood much more, but the fourth chapter for me was more humanities read and, maybe a bit of a a leap out of the social scientist way Yeah. Of thinking. And I wanted to ask you, a little bit more about how you managed I mean, you talked about Sharon's information, but how did you even think like that?
Sharad Chari:
Well, Gramsci himself, you know, before he goes, he's in prison. He's an activist and he's also a theater critic writing these, and merciless about Pirandello. We couldn't stand Pirandello. He says interested in, you know, the cultural terrain in which the possibility of political change might be, you know, articulated that this question of caring for this oceanic crisis at all is crucial. And so I also say he would have joined us binging Netflix through the pandemic.
Charne Lavery:
I like that point.
Sharad Chari:
Yeah. There's no low cultural low enough Gramsci.
Charne Lavery:
Can we return at the end to this idea of which you proposed, the idea that the Gramsci and structure of thought is oceanic? You mentioned in the book, and there's a way in which the argument overlaps a lot with the argument that we could push back on a dialectical form of thought, which has an inherent progressivism by going back to Caribbean thought and particularly the notion of tidalectics, so back and forth, the recursiveness. And that is in part the way that you described Gramsci's form of thought. You said this is important. This only form of thought is important in shaping political world, which now if you have to read this conversation, I'm like, okay.
Charne Lavery:
That's important because it's optimism. It's the world. You know, it's important to shape this optimistic political world, despite pessimistic intellectual Diagnosis. Yeah. Diagnosis.
Charne Lavery:
But so maybe to think a little bit about the relationship between oceanic and tidal electrics and also relationship in the book between what you're thinking of of is an oceanic form of thought and what could also just be considered a fluidity or it kind of more generally?
Sharad Chari:
Yeah. I thanks. That's a great question. I actually read Braithwaite's dialectics. I don't do it properly here, but I don't think what Pathway calls dialectics need be a critique of all forms of dialectical thought.
Sharad Chari:
And Ramesh, he is a dialectical thinker to the extent that he's interested in flux, transformation, change, struggle. Dialectics does not have to be thesis, synthesis, platform. I think that that this more fluid struggled over form of dialectical earthly form as well mediated through material processes, mediated in relation to the nonhuman. That is Gramsci's dialectical approach and it is consistent with the kind of dialectics, which is not just back and forth. It is the rhythms as he said, right, kind of attention to flux.
Sharad Chari:
There's some work in Gramscian studies on thinking about what distinguishes Gramscian dialectics, but I think the earthly aspect of it is something that we need to think more about. And I think that's consistent with ground weight.
Philippe Le Billon:
So in the current conjuncture, which is pretty dreadful with, you know, environmental degradation, climate change, geopolitical tensions, where would, Gramsci take hold from the sea to to come back a little bit towards the end of the book where, you know, you bring his discussion I mean, his his letter with to to his son. I'm just wondering a little bit, like, what can the ocean tell us about how we could live politically in a different way towards the planet, towards each other? I know it's a big question. But he lived in the entire war year, and so a big war came. And everybody is kind of afraid of the two big wars coming.
Philippe Le Billon:
All war against the environment and the environment kind of worrying on us as a result and and also, you know, geopolitical wars.
Sharad Chari:
That's a great question. It's interesting. Gramsci's approach to waves of struggle and counter struggle, We live in a time when that's in a way generalized, and we think we're immune to it. That's actually a mistake. We are definitely immunized from it.
Sharad Chari:
Well, the book, I think, doesn't tell us, you know, where to look, but it does maybe tell us how to think about conjunctures and different conjunctures, thinking with your own interests and your own work and your long interest in ocean defenders. And that's sort of one place to look at how in specific places, specific people, specific constellations have emerged in relation to particular oceanic issues here in Southern Africa, this, you know, amazing, struggle in Tallaveni, when which the subsea emerges as a site of ritual and and traditional
Charne Lavery:
An ancestral lineage.
Sharad Chari:
Sense, ancestral lineage, ancestral home Yeah. And also place of refuge and dreams. And that becomes part of a legal struggle to defend the ocean from extraction. Amazing. That's a site in which cultural work is crucial.
Sharad Chari:
Black cultural work is crucial and mobilized in exciting political way with hope. Of course, we need a world of this. We need a planet of ocean defenders.
Charne Lavery:
That's beautiful. What a way to end.
Sharad Chari:
Thank you. Well, the three of you could, answer anything that you asked much better than me. I appreciate it very much. Thanks a lot.
Philippe Le Billon:
Beautiful. Thank you so much. Yes.
Narrator:
This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, Gram, She at Sea, is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.