Laleh Khalili's latest manuscript, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024), gives breath to the complex and hidden life of seafaring. Khalili provides a vivid account of the lives of seafarers who power the vast global trade network, typically hidden from land-based consumers. The researcher embarked on two voyages, twenty months apart, aboard different CMA CGM ships travelling from Malta to Jabal Ali, Dubai. Using a mix of ethnographic notes, photographs, interviews, and archival materials, Khalili reveals the living conditions aboard these cargo ships.

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1. Laleh, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I first learned about The Corporal Life of Seafaring from your interview on the New Books Network podcast last year. Two aspects of your book particularly intrigued me: its ethnographic approach to the everyday lives of seafarers, and its use of photography. Could you tell us what inspired you to write this book and why you chose this approach?

Thank you so much for being interested in the book. As you probably know, I have been researching maritime infrastructures in the Arabian Peninsula for some time now, looking at how seafaring, shipping and ports have been crucial in shaping capitalist relations there. As part of this research, I visited a large number of ports in the region, but also went to places where port-workers and seafarers that visit the region come from. In other words, I not only went to places like Jabal Ali, Salalah and Kuwait, but also to Manila, Kochin, Karachi and Mumbai. Additionally, I travelled on container ships twice to get a sense of the way shipping worked on a day to day basis. Out of the interviews and ethnography I conducted over several years came Sinews of War and Trade and a number of articles and other pieces. But all of this work was focused -as one does with a book- with the central concerns of the book which was grounded in the specific geographies and histories of the Arabian Peninsula. I still had a lot of material left, a lot of interviews, a lot of stories about seafarers, which I wanted to honour by ensuring it left the hard drive of my laptop and made it into the world. That is where The Corporeal Life of Seafaring came in.

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2. The book is structured around various parts of the human body, such as hands, eyes, and muscles. Why did you choose this structure? What is the significance of focusing on the body of the seafarer, and how does this relate to the overall argument of the book?

Let me start by explaining some things about the book which would then clarify its argument and structure. Corporeal is a very different book than Sinews. Sinews is around 110,000 words long, covers around 120 years of history and while focusing on the seven countries of the Arabian Peninsula it also ranges across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal. It focuses on a lot of macro-political transformations, even as it is also attentive to the work of humans (there are three chapters on experts/managers/elites, dockworkers, and seafarers respectively). Corporeal is much smaller both in size and in its argument. It wants to focus on the way capitalism -in its manifestation in the shipping sector- affects the bodies and experiences of seafarers. Corporeal emerged as a series of talks I gave at different venues, including one in Rotterdam, where there were seafarers present. And also out of correspondences I had had with people who had read Sinews. This self-reflective and recursive material is also incorporated into Corporeal. It is primarily a work on the embodied experience of seafarers and how their day-to-day labour shapes them, but it is also a reflection on how we conduct research. I was really grateful that my wonderful editor at Mack Books, Jess Gough, was open to a somewhat experimental style that didn’t fit the conventions of scholarly writing (although the book is properly footnoted!!) and allowed me to think through this corporeal experience in a way that could also incorporate centuries of writing by and on seafarers and their limbs, their organs, and their souls.

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3. Throughout your book, you highlight the rigid and often exploitative hierarchies that govern life and work on cargo ships. In one chapter, for example, you discuss how food is managed and distributed based on rank, nationality, and race. Could you elaborate on how this social order is established and negotiated, and to what ends? Additionally, how do these practices, as you mention early in the book, maintain elements of life and work at sea from centuries ago (Khalili, 2024:25)?

Historians of seafaring across time, and especially Marcus Rediker, but also sociologists and anthropologists who have studied life aboard ships (especially in the European/Atlantic context) have delineated the extent to which ships have some of the most rigid hierarchies of any institution outside militaries. This is in part because of the forcible enlistment of seafarers into navies and merchant marines in the West, and in part because of the role of these fleets in slavery and colonialism: they wanted to ensure discipline aboard ships because they worried about the seafarers and the enslaved or colonised peoples joining arms.

There is also a long history of racialised seafaring in European merchant marine since the early modern times, and the forms that this racialisation has taken has differed across time, but a disciplined and hierarchical ship allows for the racialisation that ensures accumulation of capital to continue.

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4. Projects like the Abandoned Seafarer Map have been trying to bring forward the plight of abandoned seafarers. In your book, you mention the case of 400,000 seafarers in 2020 and  200,000 in 2021 who were captives at sea for months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. How common is this practice and how seafarers experience it? How does it connect to other forms of governance over the mobility of people on sea and land?   

Seafarer abandonment is an extreme case of wage theft. Very often shipowners abandon a ship after it has delivered a cargo and they have collected the fees. If the seafarers leave the abandoned ships, they forfeit their wages for however many months they have worked aboard. They remain onboard ships that have no fuel, and therefore no electricity, no ability to filter water, and often no food. This process of abandonment has escalated since COVID-19. As there is no overarching international way to hold these negligent shipowners to account after the abandonment, we see more and more of seafarers neglected on ships in devastating conditions.

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5. Despite the harsh working conditions these men endure, which you document extensively, the ship also serves as a site of resistance and solidarity. Linebaugh and Rediker (2012) illustrate this dual role with their concept of ‘hydrachy’, describing the ship as both the “engine of capitalism” and a “setting of resistance” in the late 17th century (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2012: 144). During the months you spent with these men, did you witness any examples of seafarers self-organising and resisting to political/economic systems exploiting them? 

Although the ability of seafarers to self-organise in order to bargain for their working conditions has been heavily circumscribed, nevertheless we see acts of extraordinary solidarity from seafarers, including rescuing migrants in unseaworthy dinghies, often at the risk of their own work duration on ships being extended and their supplies of food having to be shared. Obviously there are major limits to this kind of solidarity - determined by the working conditions and state laws that seafarers operate within. And of course I think it is also important to note that the seafarers are themselves shaped by the racial capitalism that extracts their labour and are inevitably constrained by its limitations.

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6. How do you situate this book in your scholarship? Do you see any connections between this book and previous ones? 

As I mentioned above, Corporeal is a coda to Sinews, but also, I think more broadly it reflects the same concern I have had in all my other books about the way broader macro-historical changes shape the everyday lives of peoples.

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7. I want to move our discussion to your experience as one of the few women aboard these two ships. You mention early in the book the near absence of women in the world of seafaring. How does this reality translate in the lives of those men and also how the sector operates? 

I think there are probably around 5% women seafarers worldwide and in the forums in which they discuss their working conditions, they discuss the workplace sexism, as well as forms of sexual harassment they face. That said, the woman cadet I encountered on one of my journeys was incredibly capable of holding her own. As for the men, obviously they long for and miss their partners, and their lives onboard are more intensely defined by their homosocial friendships. There is a wonderful book by Kale Fajardo, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization, which discusses questions of shipboard masculinity beautifully.

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8. What are the challenges and benefits of spending an extended period with participants while being confined on a boat?

One gets to develop relationships with the seafarers, see their work day in and day out, have long conversations, get a sense of the challenges. There really were no difficulties at all in conducting ethnography onboard, as even the inability to connect to the internet proved to be generative, allowing reflection and thought.

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9. The book includes multiple photos from your fieldwork. How did you manage to take these and what was the intention behind including pictures in analysing the work and life of seafarers? 

The photographs don’t really contain any images of the faces of seafarers, as I did not have consent to take their picture. But the photos included in the book give a sense of the experience of being aboard the ship and I hope provide an alternative way of understanding the corporeal life of seafaring.

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References

Fajardo, K. (2011). Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies and Seafearing, Masculinities and Globalization. University of Minnesota Press. 

Khalili, L. (2024). The Corporeal Life of Seafaring. MACK.

Linebaugh, P. & Rediker, M. (2012). The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Verso. 

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rémy-paulin twahirwa (he/they) is a PhD researcher in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK). His work focuses on migration, carcerality, (anti-)colonialism and the British immigration detention estate. As an abolitionist organizer,  rémy has been active in the migrant justice movement in so-called Canada and recently in the UK where he currently reside.   

Laleh Khalili is an Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Her scholarship focuses on transnational movements, on colonial forms of power and violence, and on political economy. She is the author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (2012) and Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (2007).

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