May Joseph

May Joseph was born in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania. Part of the diaspora of Asians from Africa, Joseph grew up in India and Qatar, and now lives in Greenwich Village, New York City. Joseph is the Founder of the environmental theater company Harmattan Theater, based in New York City, and has created site specific performances along shorelines, islands and other water bound landscapes around the world. Joseph's critical essays and books probe the global impact of climate change and maritime flows on art, performance, migrancy and citizenship making.

Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (2022) is a coauthored collaboration with writer and public scholar Sofia Varino of Berlin. The book chronicles twelve years of climate performances between Joseph and Varino exploring performance methodologies, decolonial aesthetics and queer ontologies through site specific durational installations with coastlines, rivers and islands.

Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (2022) is a co-edited volume of essays with Ganges River historian Sudipta Sen. The volume brings together influential historians and anthropologists addressing questions of climate, oceans, environment and coastal ecologies in South Asia.

ghosts of lumumba (2020) is a poetic memoir about growing up under Ujamaa in post-independence Tanzania. Free Download http://poeticslab.com/works/5_ghosts_of_lumumba/

Sea Log: Indian Ocean to New York (2019) is an historical memoir, exploring Indian Ocean networks across Dutch and Portuguese colonization. It draws on lyrical sociology, climate theory, autoethnography and historical writing.

Fluid New York (2013)- is an ethnographic memoir of New York between Rudolph Giuliani's and Michael Bloomberg's mayorships. The book examines the impact of water on New York's ecological self invention between 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Fluid New York documents the slow impact of "fluid urbanism" that transformed New York's coast the last three decades .

Nomadic Identities (1999) is part auto ethnography, part historical writing. It is a personal account of an African revolution and the early struggles for socialist citizenship during the first decades of Africanization in Tanzania, following independence.

Joseph is Professor of Social Science at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches coastal ecologies, environmental urbanism, film and visual culture.