Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds

by Smriti Srinivas (Editor), Bettina Ng'weno (Editor), Neelima Jeychandran (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000062168
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Series:	Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

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.

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