The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction

As one among few studies of Indian Ocean literature, this book will benefit scholars and students in humanistic disciplines interested in transnational and migratory cultures of South Asia and Africa. A valuable resource for humanities programs expanding their curriculum with nuanced interdisciplinary perspectives on postcolonial literatures.

The Indian Ocean has long connected people, objects, and ideas across continents and cultures. This book asks how contemporary writers reimagine the Indian Ocean through literary figurations of the past. In doing so, it offers an oceanic perspective for rethinking the paradigms of postcolonialism by way of rich historical context and intertextual readings of Afro-Asian fiction. Drawing on historiographical research, archival theory, and literary analysis, this book explores how writers including Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sophia Mustafa, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Barlen Pyamootoo imaginatively probe the historical and cultural legacies of transoceanic pasts within the political contradictions and identarian divisions of the postcolonial present. Traveling between South Asia and Eastern Africa and between the past and the present through literary, filmic, theoretical, and archival texts, this book contends that any understanding of South Asian or African present is incomplete without a consideration of their entangled pasts.