ABSTRACT
The blurred geographical and conceptual boundaries of the Indian Ocean region reveal deep engagements with other world regions and variegated spatial reckonings. They also suggest that a coherent Indian Ocean has often served as a powerful and desirable fiction of the collective imagination, a fiction developed by different actors at many historical junctures for different reasons. Tellingly, this perception of the Indian Ocean as a totality is both related to but not confined by the sea. Rather, Indian Ocean basin consciousness has expanded significantly even as maritime connectivity has diminished and multidimensional, extra-regional interfaces have intensified. Therefore, this chapter suggests that the most powerful and enduring dynamic of the Indian Ocean region in the present may not be engagements among people along its shores but rather the projection of sociocultural meaning onto, among other things, economic relationships, communities of faith, genealogies, and history.
