ABSTRACT
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
part I|64 pages
Proximity and distance
chapter 3|15 pages
The littoral, the container, and the interface
part II|60 pages
Landscapes, oceanscapes, and practices
chapter 5|14 pages
Elsewheres in the Indian Ocean
chapter 7|15 pages
Improvising Juba
part III|47 pages
Memory and maps
chapter 10|15 pages
Shorelines of memory and ports of desire
chapter 11|14 pages
The ship and the anchor
part IV|48 pages
Methods and disciplines