Awam Amkpa

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (May 27 - June 28) :

Professor Ampka envisions "What Does Freedom Look Like?" as a bridge to a multi-format reflection on the meanings of freedom in the Indian Ocean compared to the Atlantic Ocean (which Professor Amkpa’s collaborator and him have researched) from the eighteenth to the twentieth-centuries in which corporeal representations and their discursiveness have influenced cultures and their itineraries. The project considers art and cultural practices-- and ways in which individuals, groups, and institutions represented, connected, circulated, and lived out multiple conceptions of freedom-- as oceans and lands interlocked to shape the “the modern world” that is shared today. What implications did these conceptions have for the exercise of individual liberty, or the realization of communal self-determination? The nuances of the terms “liberty,” “freedom,” and “independence” depend of course, upon the contexts in which they are used, and the languages and media used to articulate them. The salience of concepts of “freedom” in shaping human relationships in the “modern world” prompts people to ask: how did individuals or collectives within and across national borders encounter, understand, and engage these ideas though word, art, and action? The project documents and discusses meanings and experiences of freedom as they unfolded in a variety of cross-cultural media in Indian ocean worlds as well as their mediations; from political treatises and fugitive memoirs, through the halls of legislatures and courts of law, to slave ships and plantations, music halls and photography studios, picket lines and freedom buses, and the quotidian rituals of everyday life. The conceptual backdrop for this project lies in global histories of labor (bonded and free) and empire dating back to what (European) historians label as the “early modern” period. New structures of power and knowledge reconfigured the identities of the people involved in these exchanges particularly in the Indian ocean stretching from China, not simply through the apparatuses of law, political economy, and boundary drawing, but also through new technologies of representation which included word and visuals, architecture and rituals, and sound and motion.