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The Indian Ocean has long connected people, objects, and ideas across continents and cultures. This book asks how contemporary writers reimagine the Indian Ocean through literary figurations of the past. In doing so, it offers an oceanic perspective for rethinking the paradigms of postcolonialism by way of rich historical context and intertextual readings of Afro-Asian fiction. Drawing on historiographical research, archival theory, and literary analysis, this book explores how writers including Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sophia Mustafa, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Barlen Pyamootoo imaginatively probe the historical and cultural legacies of transoceanic pasts within the political contradictions and identarian divisions of the postcolonial present. Traveling between South Asia and Eastern Africa and between the past and the present through literary, filmic, theoretical, and archival texts, this book contends that any understanding of South Asian or African present is incomplete without a consideration of their entangled pasts.
List of contents
Introduction: the archive and the drift; 1. Language: cosmopolitan pasts and the problem of translation; 2. Narrative: Afro-Asian intimacies beyond post/colonial frames; 3. Body: indenture, nationalism, and queer contours of diaspora; 4. Place: India in Africa and the invisibility of black migrancy; 5. Sea: Chagos, testimonial fiction, and the afterlives of slavery; Coda: ocean as comparison; Notes; Index.
About the author
Kritish Rajbhandari is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. His doctoral dissertation won the ACLA Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation in Comparative Literature in 2020. He has published in South Asia, Research in African Literatures, and Comparative Literature and translated two books of poetry from Nepalbhasa.
