Introduction

The Indian Ocean is a particularly dense ecology of epistemological knowledge production. During the period identified by Paul Crutzen as one of the phases of the Anthropocene, it was a crucible of escalating European colonization, as well as the site of entrenched anti-colonial resistance. Crutzen identifies the 1800s—the period of colonization and industrialization—as one accelerating phase in the proliferation of human impact upon the planet. Traveling at the peak of the monsoon, it was a formative, traumatic sea journey in which he left the known to travel the Black Waters of the Indian Ocean. The ocean was a lake between Africa and India. The challenge to articulate its syncretic interiorities was a daunting one. The only way forward was to glance at the while propelling into futurity, like the Sankofa bird found engraved on one of the coffins in the African burial ground in downtown New York.