Abstract
This conversation between an academic (Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Kings College London) and a visual artist (Naiza Khan, London-Karachi) draws on an intellectual exchange of over a decade to dredge up submerged histories of the Indian Ocean that both share as part of their relationship to the port cities of Kolkata and Karachi respectively. Responding to key works by Khan that reference the monsoon as a sensory context for that history, the interlocutors mobilize a conjunction of near and far sites and sights. They thereby reveal the necessity of recognizing water in all its atmospheric states as a connector between African and Asian landmasses; as a releaser of creolized ways of life that are repressed by nationalist, nativist, and casteist narratives; and as a generator of alegropolitics, or the politics of embodied joy, through which to resist those convergent landcentric hegemonies.
