Maritime Criticism for Today's World: A Review of Juan-José Martín-González, Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Maritime Transmodernities and The Ibis Trilogy
Postcolonial Text, 2019
Amitav Ghosh remains an atypical member of the postcolonial club (as it were) because of his insistent focus upon the sea (rather than land) in a number of his works as the locus for viewing/understanding the historical and cultural encounters between the West and the non-West. Indeed, where much postcolonial writing remains centred on issues of land, dispossession, and diaspora, Ghosh has shown remarkable dissidence in his interests in the sea and, in what I, adapting the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, call, “maritime transmodernities” in order to launch his critique of both Eurocentrism and its equally problematic agon, critical postcolonialism. Through a close reading of the littoral, coastal, and maritime in the three novels that comprise the Ibis Trilogy, I hope to show the ways in which Ghosh’s interest has subtly shifted from land and territorial structures for articulating and critiquing contemporary political events (The Calcutta Chromosome, 1995; The Shadow Lines, 1998) to the sea and to maritime frameworks for understanding the deeper, more genealogically complex currents of human interaction across time and space, a move that marks such works as In An Antique Land, 1992; The Hungry Tide, 2004; and the Ibis Trilogy, 2008-15. Such a move has entailed the transformation of the postmodern novel into what I call "the transmodern novel." For such an assessment of Ghosh's corpus of writings, central is also a reading methodology that itself has a transmodern face and actualizes multiple centres of hermeneutics, enabling one to read a writer like Ghosh from/within diverse traditions. In such a light, I read Ghosh's reworking of many of the tenets of the postcolonial and the postmodern (novel) from the vantage of a specifically Bengali literary heritage.
World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: The Case of J.-M. G Le Clézio’s and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels J.-M. G. Le Clézio and Amitav Ghosh are prolific award-winning writers who train their reader’s eye on transversal and lateral exchanges in the Indian Ocean. This essay presents an approach to the study of their novels as littérature mondialisante rather than littérature-monde, that is, as world-forming literature rather than world literature. Borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical discussion in The Creation of The World or Globalization, I propose a notion of world literature as a critical practice attentive to the mobilities within the texts. Theoretical considerations about postcolonial world literature are coupled with anthropologist Engseng Ho’s distinction between the colonial and the imperial. I argue that the respective aesthetic priorities of these author, and their fictional use of the histories of slavery and indenture in Mauritius, is best be understood by means of the notion of interactive universalisms, which I borrow (and modify) from Seyla Benhabib.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: writing the Indian Ocean
Geeska
This article takes Gurnah’s Nobel win as an opportunity to explore some of the most pressing theoretical and critical challenges in interpreting his literature within the framework of African writing. In particular, it examines the limitations in the geographical imagination surrounding various African literary traditions, their critical reception, and the approaches to the histories, spaces, and contexts of these traditions, dating back to the 1960s. Gurnah’s exploration of the Indian Ocean in his novels provides an avenue to address these concerns, especially regarding how critics and scholars engage with African literature, both within Africa and globally.
Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies, Vol. 8 No. 2 (2023), 2023
I ‘Praise the sea and stay on land’ Fernand Braudel was one of the most significant historian of the last century, someone who has forced the discipline to rethink its fundamentals: the idea of time and the notion of space. In his magnum opus, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, he writes, "My feeling is that the sea itself, the one we see and love, is the greatest document of its past existence. 'Lauso la mare e tente' n terro' (‘Praise the sea and stay on land’) says a Provençal proverb." Braudel was in captivity during the World war II, first at Meyenne from 1940-42 and then from 1942-45 at Lubeck. This is where the first drafts of the Mediterranean were written on school exercise books which were sent to his friend Lucien Febvre. According to Braudel, the book could only have been written during his confinement as a prisoner of war. While the book forced us to look at the sea as an integral part of the history, it challenged conventional ideas of periodization by offering a completely new way of thinking about the time in history. In this re-articulation, time was not divided into evenly measured units but compressed and stretched in disproportionate ways, something he borrowed from Bergson. Prolong captivity and his earlier experience as a lycee teacher in Algeria ( from 1923-32) both shaped the way he looked at the Mediterranean. The sea came 'upside down' and the idea of time in revolutionary new avatar for the discipline of history. II Getting aware The Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) is a civilizational text. A critique of Western modernity and colonialism, it has been bestowed an iconic status in the struggle against the empire in the twentieth century and it continues to inspire postcolonial scholars. Mahatma Gandhi wrote it on board Kildonan Castle on his return journey from England to South Africa in 1909. The whole manuscript was written on the ship’s stationery. He wrote as ‘if under inspiration’. In his words, ‘I have written because I could not restrain myself’. When exhausted from writing with his right, he switched to his left hand and continued. Forty out of two hundred and seventy-five pages were written by the left hand. Oblivious to the legibility of his writing (in any case, he never wrote in beautiful handwriting), thoughts jostled against the human body to come out on the ship’s stationary. The ocean beneath gave shape to his words. The oceanic milieu, in this case of Hind Swaraj, became the site for the production of civilizational critique. The realisation of this role of an oceanic landscape was not self-evident unless I began reading Ocean as Method, the book under review. While reading Nishat Zaidi’s fine-grained essay on some late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel accounts of Indian Muslims, I began pondering about the location of the ship and the watery surface below that gave birth to this seminal text of the twentieth century. Following Zaidi, I became aware of ‘the role of the sea as a historical site’. Zaidi writes that ‘these voyagers provide a planetary perspective where narratives are often controlled by the forces of nature and not humans or technologies’. Oceanic spaces blessed their surfers with a ‘double-vision’. Travellers ‘critiqued London society from their native perspective’ on the one hand and on the other they ‘used European parameters in their radical criticism of their own people and society’. Words written on the oceanic waters leave a deep impact. I recall another example. A page from the voyage journal of William Jones aboard the frigate Crocodile on the way to India in 1783. Here, he noted down 16 areas he intended to study in India. These covered vast domains like the laws of Hindus and Muhamdens; arithmetic and geometry and the mixed sciences of asiatics; and the trade, manufactures, agriculture and commerce of India to name only a few. Historian O.P. Kejariwal remarks that ‘no ordinary mortal would even think of achieving all this in a single lifetime’. The oceanic turn in general and the book Ocean as Method in particular whisper about the role of oceanic water and sea breeze in the making of this archive. Hind Swaraj, Travel writings of Indian Muslims and a page from the journal of the orientalist William Jones are merely three illustrations while Thinking with the Maritime. A book opens itself in various directions. A voice yells, Heave the lead. Thomas Roebuck’s laskars coming from Surat, Ghogha, Sind and Kutch reply back, 'Naki did ho' (ref. Hindustani Naval Dictionary, originally compiled by by Thomas Roebuck in 1810 and later published as Laskari Dictionary or Anglo Indian Vocabulary of Nautical Terms and Phrases in English and Hindustani chiefly in the Corrupt Jargon in use among Laskars or Indian Sailors re edited and enlarged by George Small, London, 1882) . Those coming from Bengal, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Kulaba say, Jahāz salamat prūm hazir. Arabs and laskars from a ‘religious turn’ (not specified) sing out Sallū ’ala-n-Nabi (God’s blessing be on Prophet). However, the scenario may not always be so serene and for the command of ‘heave and rally’, the entry in the dictionary returns with 'habes mera bāp (or bhāi) khāli nangar'. Sometimes, the situation warrants a little aggressive language: 'habes sālā! bahin chod habes! habes harāmzūda!' What is needed is an ear to catch these sounds coming from the oceanic archive. The book under review is an attempt to tune the ears of land-centric social sciences towards the complexities and specificities of ocean-centric subjectivities and spatialities. However, it does not stop by rearticulating the sea as the centre. Instead, it pushes to think with the maritime and enter into a zone of theory where the ocean acquires an agency, a subjectivity and no longer remains a passive location. Dilip Menon underlines the contemporaneity of the shift in perspective and its relevance when he writes: ‘We need to start walking on water if we are to truly understand the time and space of globalization’. III Walking on the Water To read the full review see
Introduction The Contours of a Field: Literatures of the Indian Ocean
Postcolonial Text, 2019
This essay is the Introduction to an edited collection as a two-set Special Issue, published in Postcolonial Text in December 2019, titled "Maritime Transmodernities: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Indian Ocean World." In it, I pose the question: "[W]hat is it about the ocean that makes it as an analytical category or critical paradigm distinct from land?" The edited collection examines the Indian Ocean World and its literatures as providing an important archive of interconnected knowledge and world-views. The collection shows that the Indian Ocean World challenges the many givens of Postcolonial Studies, moving the unit of analysis from terrestrial to oceanic spaces, from the nation-state as an organizing category to the littoral.
The Indian Ocean Meets the South Seas
The article draws on and extends recent scholarship on Indian Ocean literary studies in a new direction, drawing the nexus of comparison of Indian Ocean studies – typically compared with Black Atlantic studies – eastwards, towards the Pacific literary world. This is undertaken through a close reading of one of Zanzibari-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah’s more overlooked and interesting novels, Desertion, in conversation with a Pacific-based discourse, via Robert Louis Stevenson, of beachcombers.
Sea Fiction as World Literature
The Annals of “Ovidius” University Constanţa PHILOLOGY Series, 2023
This paper comprehensively examines sea fiction as world literature from the theoretical perspectives of Franco Moretti and David Damrosch by exploring how it qualifies as world literature through the lens of their theories, highlighting the genre's global circulation, evolution and representation of both universal and local experiences. The research begins with a comparative analysis of Damrosch's and Moretti's approaches to world literature, as the former's focus on the transnational circulation of literature provides a foundation for understanding how sea fiction has transcended cultural boundaries, while the latter's emphasis on the diffusion and transformation of literary forms illuminates the genre's evolution and global reach. The paper explores sea fiction's manifestation as a global genre, employing Moretti's concept of distant reading to analyse large-scale trends. In addition, the study investigates the influence of sea fiction on postcolonial and postmodern rewritings, demonstrating how the genre's main themes and narratives have been adapted and reframed in contemporary world literature. The translations and global circulation of classical sea fiction are examined as critical factors that have facilitated their evolution from national and regional narratives into integral components of the world literature system. In conclusion, sea fiction is presented as a microcosm of the broader world literature system. Its interplay with world literature and global genres offers a rich field for future literary studies. The findings of this research paper underscore the enduring relevance of sea fiction in the literary field and its significant role in fostering a mutual literary journey transcending cultural and geographical boundaries.
"Views from Other Boats: On Amitav Ghosh's Indian Ocean 'Worlds'," AHR Roundtable, December 2016
Eschewing the controversies surrounding the book and its author, the paper detailed Thornton's interpretation of key elements of the history of its main protagonist, Kunta Kinte, and his life in the Gambia in the late eighteenth century to determine whether such a figure could indeed have existed much as Haley claimed that he had. In her commentary on the paper, Caroline Elkins, the equally distinguished and Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian of British colonial violence in Kenya, drew attention to the issue of a positivist versus a subjective approach to historical materials and their relation to the representation of the past. "At what point," she asks, "are we certain as historians that we are actually factually correct in that kind of positivist way based upon our evidence versus a kind of certainty with our subjective interpretation?" Elkins was making a point about the dividing line between the positivism of "fact" sought by a televised production seeking to establish an authenticity for its visual representation of the past versus the subjectivity of historians' interpretations of that past in which the data and materials they collect are open to alternative interpretations and are replete with gray areas or only the lightest human imprints, and absences and silences. In thinking about these questions, Elkins urged Thornton and the audience members to consider critically how we can understand the intersection between fiction, creative license, and historical interpretation. In turn, Thornton's rejoinder-while allowing for the possibility that Haley "had made the whole thing up"-stressed that if we regard Roots as historical fiction, then the matter at hand becomes one of historical verisimilitude. In other words, the historian's task in this instance is to establish As will be clear to those familiar with the historiography of the Indian Ocean, my title owes a debt to,
Comparative Literature, 2012
at the ACLA meeting. I am focusing here on the literary elements that are more appropriate for Comparative Literature. I thank the journal and our Association for this opportunity to share a small aspect of the literary history of my country of origin, Mauritius, the Ile de France of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's time. The island's two-hundred-year tradition of Francophone literature remains little known to most scholars working in the United States today. This essay is an adapted and translated version of a section of my 2012 book Le su et l'incertain. I thank Alexis Pernsteiner for her help with translations. See also Lionnet, "'New World' Exiles" for a discussion of both eighteenth-and twentieth-century authors from the Mascarene region. 2012 ACLA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS FRANçOISE LIONNET Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean T hE INDIAN OCEAN has always been the most "global" of all oceans. It is the oldest in human history and has enabled contact among travelers, scholars, and merchants of the most diverse origins for more than 5000 years. It figures in a sizable corpus of travel narratives and other literary genres that have influenced the direction of European literary movements from the eighteenth century to the present. Yet it remains, among U.S.-based humanists, the least studied of the large bodies of water that link continents, archipelagos, and their inhabitants. historian Michael Pearson has suggested that a better name for the Indian Ocean might have been the "Afrasian Sea." More apt geographically, this designation is more inclusive. It removes the implication that one area, India, is privileged and refocuses attention on the African, Middle Eastern, Arabian, and other Asian elements of the whole region. In addition, the rival interests of warring European empires led them to lay claim to islands and continental littoral areas, ensuring their continued presence as "Indian Ocean Rim" nations. 1 For the