About the Event
Across Two Seas brings together scholars, curators, artists, and community members for a multi-day symposium at Rice University on Black subjectivities across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, Islamic world, and Indian Ocean. Through panels, film screenings, public conversations, and interdisciplinary dialogue, the symposium explores how Black subjects were represented in artistic, literary, and documentary sources and how these representations were shaped by trade, travel, religion, knowledge-making, and cultural exchange. By connecting Europe, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, Across Two Seas expands the geography of premodern race studies and places the Indian Ocean at the center of conversations too often framed primarily through Europe. The symposium invites broader publics to consider how histories of Blackness were made across multiple regions, media, and worlds.
