ABSTRACT
How are Indian Ocean histories remembered? What forms does the memory of its pasts, forged along littorals, interiors, on islands and boats, take? In what ways have these pasts been memorialized or represented, or produced as “heritage”? This chapter explores these questions through an understanding of memory and memorialization as imagined through sites and landscapes marked by a range of experiences and historical trajectories. The collective efforts of individuals and communities often refuse to let memory rest or disappear, though their practices can occlude painful pasts. Framed around an idea of the ocean as a space of migration, slavery, marine extraction, and mutable sacred geographies, the chapter examines the materiality and practices of remembering the past in specific locales in East and South Africa, the Gulf, and India, as establishing ways of knowing and identification that can align with state-sanctioned views of the past or transcend them to create alternative forms of community memory. The chapter considers also the relationship between acts of remembrance and “heritage,” processes that, although they are imbricated with one another, exist at times in tension to each other.
