Book Review: Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures Across the Indian Ocean (original) (raw)
Archipelagic Memory and Indian Ocean Literary Studies: An Introduction
Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, 2024
The introduction to our co-edited special issue, ‘Archipelagic Memory and Indian Ocean Literature’. of “Monsoon”, which offers Indian Ocean Studies a cutting-edge collection of essays drawing on new research by early and mid-career scholars, a one-of-a-kind dialogue between Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock, and a translation of a lecture by Japanese theorist of archipelagicity, Imafuku Ryuta. From the introduction: 'For us, the editors of this special issue of Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, and for its contributors, it is precisely the work of “archipelagic memory,” the theme of our special issue, that restores to critical and popular discourse alike these broken, hidden, but still palpable links drawing sites and peoples across the Indian Ocean into networks and further reticulating them within the connected oceans. Borrowing from the topology of the archipelago, the archipelagic is an epistemic modality that transacts simultaneously with the fragmented and the isolated to enable relations of contiguity that do not aspire to unbrokenness to make sense. How, where, and why is the archipelagic remembered, and what leads to its being forgotten?'
Introduction: A Collaboratory of Indian Ocean Ethnographies | Society for Cultural Anthropology
Member Voices, Fieldsights. September 23., 2021
In the thick of pandemic immobility, a few scholars working on environmental justice with coastal communities in the northern Indian Ocean and locked down in different continents came together to overcome the impact of motionlessness in their research lives. Their field sites covered the littoral and marine expanses of the northern “Indian Ocean community” (Kirk 1951), a space not only deeply integrated into global social, economic, and geopolitical concerns, but also profoundly unequal within and between its nations (Grare 2012). The pandemic had not just caused immobility, but also brought down an unsettling fog of silence in news media and within research communities. There was no (and in many cases still is no) way for researchers to know what was/is really happening in the various coastal communities connected by the Indian Ocean: a region known for its long and vibrant history of movement, migration, and cultural exchange. The immobility therefore felt particularly intense, and we wondered how, in these circumstances, does one conduct “immobile” research?
Transforming Cultures eJournal, 2009
This paper discusses the interpretation of sources for Indian Ocean history, from the point of view of translocal interpretations beyond the locality of the source. The article presents three cases, all deriving from the Muslim South-Western Indian Ocean. The argument is made that the ambiguity of the sources, and the interrelationship between the various locations related to the source, affect not only the historians interpretation but also the sense of the past held by people in these locations.
Ethnomusicology and the Indian Ocean: On the Politics of Area Studies. (Co-Written with Julia Byl)
Ethnomusicology, 2020
Abstract. This article draws on the recent boom in Indian Ocean studies to build a framework for registering the Indian Ocean in ethnomusicology. We show how the human experiences of movement across the Indian Ocean expanse have conditioned the musical traditions of ports and islands, and we put ethnomusicological writings on places like Zanzibar and Oman into dialogue with those from Mauritius and Singapore. We address how ethnomusicology’s area studies paradigm has inhibited musical studies of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR); the specter of comparative musicology; and the perils of modern Indian Ocean populations in light of postcolonial ethnonationalisms.
What Makes a Carpet Fly? Cultural Studies in the Indian Ocean
Transforming Cultures eJournal
This paper aims to open up a cultural studies conversation on the Indian Ocean. Knowledge of the Indian Ocean should be born of the problems encountered in situ, rather than viewed and assessed from afar in erstwhile colonial centres. Networks and institutional links have to be created to sustain an interdisciplinary conversation leading to this decolonisation of knowledge. In investigating the interplay of commerce and culture, this paper abandons the critical separation of the two in favour of a critical engagement with forces of globalisation. As a precolonial global economy, the Indian Ocean offers considerable historical depth to the current ranking of economic powers. But within a general problematic of the theory of value, there is no doubt that cultural forms (narratives, myths religious beliefs, artefacts) are fundamental to the organising forces of trade, and not just ‘adding value’ in market transactions.
Ethnomusicology and the Indian Ocean: On the Politics of Area Studies
Ethnomusicology, 2020
This article draws on the recent boom in Indian Ocean studies to build a framework for registering the Indian Ocean in ethnomusicology. We show how the human experiences of movement across the Indian Ocean expanse have conditioned the musical traditions of ports and islands, and we put ethnomusicological writings on places like Zanzibar and Oman into dialogue with those from Mauritius and Singapore. We address how ethnomusicology’s area studies paradigm has inhibited musical studies of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR); the specter of comparative musicology; and the perils of modern Indian Ocean populations in light of postcolonial ethnonationalisms.Untuk membangun pengertian Lingkup Samudra India (Indian Ocean Studies) dalam bidang ethnomusikologi, artikel ini bersumber dari kumpulan studi sarjana-sarjana ilmu sosial yang merintis penelitian ini. Pengalaman migrasi manusia, dari pulau ke pulau dan pelabuhan ke pelabuhan, telah membentuk kebudayaan bermusik yang sudah lama dalam lingkup...
Narrating the indian ocean: challenging the circuits of migrating notions
2013
This paper presents an outline of the parallels between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean seen from a cultural studies’ perspective. The discussion will highlight some concepts, such as Créolie, Coolitude and Créolité which were created to grasp the specificity of the cultural consequences of forced migration and the imposed contact among a multitude of cultures in the two regions. Secondly, insularity will be presented as an in-between space of contact between cultures where knowledge is generated, negotiated and transmitted via its narration. This process will be analysed as an example of Créolité in the context of the Indian Ocean, taking as case study the three volumes of Enlacement(s) (2013) by the Malagasy writer Jean-Luc Raharimanana.