Sharad Chari: Pip, Ellen Gallagher, and the White Whale: the Afrofuturism of Moby-Dick

Is Moby-Dick an American book? Is its narrator ("Call me Ishmael") white? What is the 'whiteness of the whale' that is the object of furious pursuit by a captain who has clearly lost his mind? This presentation approaches these questions through a remarkable artist, Ellen Gallagher, who paints in the tradition of the 'scrimshaw,' the art of whalers, and who sees Moby-Dick an Afrofuturist work.
Sharad Chari is a Geographer who teaches at UC Berkeley and writes about the country and the city, apartheid and its aftermath, Black queer biography, and imperial oceanics, in India, South Africa and the Southern African Indian Ocean. He is also intrigued by the encyclopedic, enigmatic Moby-Dick.