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This book, with a focus on the East African coast and especially on the Kenyan coast, puts into conversation cross-generic texts - the historical novel, the Indian Ocean novel, oral history, oral testimony, and oral poetry - in two main languages - English and Kiswahili - with the aim of challenging, expanding and complementing the existing knowledge archive on Indian Ocean histories and its ideations on the Kenyan coast. It especially pays attention to the local forms of expression that articulate the Indian Ocean world from personal, local and intimate perspectives. The intimate, personal and local maps of the sea that emerge from this set of texts are derived from local articulations of the sea, informed by musings by seafarers who include divers, sailors, fishers and beach operators.
The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and cultural studies, African studies and Indian Ocean studies.
List of contents
Introduction - Refiguring Indian Ocean Epistemological Cartographies Critical Ocean Studies
Oral Sources
Chapter Outlines
Chapter 1 - Historical Sources and the Writing of Fiction in Valerie Cuthbert's The Great Siege of Fort JesusHistory and Fiction; History as Narrative
Portuguese Historiography of the Indian Ocean World
Portuguese-Oriented Histories of the Kenyan Coast: Cuthbert's Sources
Reproduction of the Colonial Archive: Imported biases in Cuthbert's novel
Chapter 2 - Subverting Eurocentric Histories of the Swahili Coast in the 19th CenturyDistanced Affinities and Proximate Tensions: Oral and biographical reflections on Rebmann
Humanizing the Demonized: Subverting Eurocentric histories of the Swahili coast
Chapter 3 - Re-figuring the Colonial Archive: Oral Historiographies of Fort Jesus in MombasaFort Jesus, a Portuguese Fortress: The official oral history of Fort Jesus
Ngomeni, not Fort Jesus: A Digo home, not a Portuguese fortress
Of Disruptions and Erasures: A comparative reading of the oral histories of Fort Jesus
Chapter 4 - From Surface to Depth: Material and Multidimensional Perspectives of the Indian OceanLateral Connections and the Economic Dimension of the Sea
Underwater Perspectives and the Spiritual Dimension of the Sea
Chapter 5 - A Dead and Dying Sea: The Ecological Dimension of the Indian Ocean on the Kenyan CoastSummoning Local Art Forms: Ecological functions of Swahili oral poetry
Generation Eyewitnesses: Fishers' articulation of a dead and dying sea
Chapter 6 - A Biography of the Indian Ocean: Tracing alternative sea maps in Yvonne Owuor's The Dragonfly SeaSensuous Maps of the Indian Ocean
Owuor's Ecocritical and Political Project in
The DragonflyConclusion - Notes on Expaning Epistemic TerritoriesReferences
About the author
Jacky Kosgei is Junior Professor of Global Epistemologies at University of Tübingen in Germany. Her research interests in Indian Ocean Studies are located at the intersection of literary, cultural, historical and anthropological studies. She is the co-editor of the recently published
Proximity as Method (2024).
