2015 Wall Scholar Renisa Mawani wins Asian American Studies Book Award
May 3, 2020
We are pleased to announce that 2015 Wall Scholar Renisa Mawani has won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History for her book Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press).
Mawani accepted the award from her home on April 30, 2020. Watch her acceptance speech here:
Her book was also shortlisted for the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Theory and History Prize.
Released in 2018, Renisa Mawani (Sociology, UBC) finished writing Across Oceans of Law while in residence as a Wall Scholar in 2015. In the book, Mawani draws on what she terms “oceans as method” – a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea – to examine the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration in maritime worlds. By following the movements of the famous Komagata Maru, she traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests over the so-called free sea and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.
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