Indian Ocean Imaginings

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the Indian Ocean region, bringing together perspectives from the disciplines of history, defense and strategic studies, cultural and religious studies, and environmental studies. From the earliest exchanges through Sumerian and Harappan trade, to emerging geopolitical alliances in the twenty-first century, this volume demonstrates both the continuity and change of the region as well as its unity and diversity. The expanse of this ocean and its littoral rim is connected through the social imaginary, which enables these processes. It is with the stories of the peoples inhabiting this rim that this book is concerned—told both through micro studies of the everyday lives of the region’s people and through macro studies centered around civilizations, empires, nation-states, and climate change.

This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world—Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen—alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.

Contributed articles.

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.

Surveys the origin, geological borders, climate, water, plant and animal life, and economic and ecological aspects of the Indian Ocean.

The scale and severity of our environmental challenges are quickly becoming apparent. The Indian Ocean region features many places particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, which will have profound social, economic, and cultural impacts. The increasing preoccupation with the state of the environment is also having significant political effects, including on the concept and content of citizenship. The language of citizenship has permeated environmental discourse and, conversely, environmental issues are often articulated in the language of citizenship. This book explores environmental citizenship and civil society responses to environmental challenges in the Indian Ocean region. The articles provide practical insights to improve resilience and adaptation, as well as conceptual insights into the nature of environmental citizenship discourse and practice across this vast region, from Mauritius to Malaysia. The volume showcases the complex field of environmental citizenship through a wide range of approaches, and alongside closely related concepts, such as environmental governance, environmental education, environmental justice, and corporate social responsibility. In essence, the book provides a rich, diverse and multidimensional picture of environmental citizenship in the Indian Ocean region. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

Throughout history, dominance of the Indian Ocean has been a critical factor in defining a nation's supremacy and power. It is well known that it played a major part in the success of the Portugese nation at the start of the sixteenth century. In this concise survey, Milo Kearney shows how the trading and imperial expansion offered by the Indian Ocean were exploited by many leading powers from the third millennium BC to the very recent past. The nations included range from the ancient Egyptians of the new Kingdom to the Han Chinese and, later, from the Moghul to the British Empire. Milo Kearney goes on to show what a critical territory the Indian Ocean was during the Cold War because of its rich supply for oil. The history of the Indian Ocean provides a snapshot of many of the key issues in world history, such as colonialism, trade and spread of cultures and religions. It is important reading for all students of world history.