
Firat Oruc delivered a lecture on ‘Indian Ocean Cinematic Networks’. It was chaired by Ravikant.
Employing maritime historian Michael Pearson’s conceptualization of the Indian Ocean world as an archipelagic continuum of communities that are ecologically, structurally and culturally shaped by the sea, the lecture explores the representations of Indian Ocean littoral societies in film. The speaker argues that a theory of moving images in the Indian Ocean must resist their rigidification and aggregation in association with nations and states, instead, attune to the range and reach of mobile and small societies. Indian Ocean littoral films are inherently archipelagic-a smattering of tiny islands in the cultural atlas of world cinema, albeit so far largely invisible to the international image market and academic film study.
Firat Oruc is Associate Professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is the editor of “Indian Ocean Literary Circularities,” a special issue of Comparative Literature (2022) and Sites of Pluralism: Community Politics in the Middle East (2019). His scholarship on Indian Ocean and Gulf Studies has appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals.
Ravikant is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Thursday, 13 April 2023, 4.30 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom http://bit.ly/3Kenca0