Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds
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Book Description
This book breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies.
Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations.
An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Many Worlds, Many Oceans, Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng’weno and Neelima Jeychandran Part I Proximity and Distance 1. The Ends of the Indian Ocean: Notes on Boundaries and Affinities across Time, Jeremy Prestholdt 2. Indian Ocean Ontology: Nyerere, Memory, Place, May Joseph 3. The Littoral, the Container, and the Interface: Situating the Dry Port as an Indian Ocean Imaginary, Ishani Saraf 4. Seasons of Sail: The Monsoon, Kinship, and Labor in the Dhow Trade, Nidhi Mahajan Part II Landscapes, Oceanscapes, and Practices 5. Elsewheres in the Indian Ocean: Spatio-Temporal Encounters and Imaginaries Beyond the Sea, Nethra Samarawickrema 6. Dicey Waterways: Evolving Networks and Contested Spatialities in Goa, Maya Costa-Pinto 7. Improvising Juba: Productive Precarity and Making the Present at the Edge of the Indian Ocean World, Christian J. Doll 8. Displacemaking with Shutki: Living with Dead, Dried Fish as Companions, Bidita Jawher Tithi Part III Memory and Maps 9. Memory, Memorialization and "Heritage" in the Indian Ocean, Pedro Machado 10. Shorelines of Memory and Ports of Desire: Geography, Identity, and the Memory of Oceanic Trade in Mekran Coast (Balochistan), Hafeez Ahmed Jamali 11. The Ship and The Anchor: Shifting Cartographies of Affinity and Belonging Among Sikhs in Fiji, Nicole Ranganath Part IV Methods and Disciplines 12. Bibi’s Uchungu: Eating, Bitterness, and Relationality across Indian Ocean Worlds, Laura A. Meek 13. Marfa Masti: Performing Shifting Indian Ocean Geographies, Pallavi Sriram 14. Exploring the "Unknown:" Indian Ocean Materiality as Method, Vivian Y. Choi
Editor(s)
Biography
Smriti Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA.
Bettina Ng’weno is Associate Professor for African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA.
Neelima Jeychandran is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in African Studies and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA.