Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities

Abstract

Readers of PMLA Recognize 26 Broadway, in New York City, as the Headquarters of the Mla, One of the Major Hubs of Intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in North America. But in the summer of 1840, 26 Broadway was a commercial hub that connected the world of the Atlantic Ocean with the world of the Indian Ocean. Here, in the offices of the New York firm Barclay and Livingston, Ahmad Bin Na'aman, special envoy of the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Said, offered for sale merchandise that had been brought to the United States from Muscat and Zanzibar. The merchandise included “1,300 bags of dates, 21 bales of Persian wool carpets and 100 bales of Mokha coffee” that had been acquired at Muscat and “108 prime ivory tusks, 81 cases of gum copal, … 135 bags of cloves and 1,000 dry salted hides” from Zanzibar (Eilts 32). The cargo had come to New York on 30 April 1840 aboard the Sultanah, a bark owned by the sultan and commanded by William Sleeman, an Englishman. Except for two Frenchmen whose identities are uncertain and two Englishwomen who had sought passage to London, where the ship was headed, most of those on board were African slaves belonging to the ship's officers and hired lascars, Muslim seamen from the lower Konkan and Malabar coasts of India who had been signed on in Bombay, where the ship had been refitted for the transatlantic voyage and from which it first embarked (3). The slaves, we are told, were dressed in garments made of coarse cotton cloth “called merikani, after the country of its manufacture” (4). In his account of the voyage of the Sultanah, Hermann Frederick Eilts writes of “the pungent vapors of cloves, gum copal and coffee (from the ship's cargo), of tar and pitch, of open-hearth cooking in deep, acrid sheep tail's fat, called ghee, of primitive shipboard sanitation and of coconut oil” (4). This account of the “first Arab emissary and the first Arab vessel to visit American shores” is a rich reminder of the historical interconnections in the world (6).

Postcolonial ecocriticism, island tourism and a geopoetics of the beach

“…Situating local ecology within a contemporary framework of transnational economies and mass consumerism, Mauritian fiction's rich inscription of coastal spaces foreground the historic dynamism of tropical ecologies that bear witness to and participate in the islands' negotiation with the shifting forces of Empire. Lastly, reflecting the Indian Ocean's much documented multilayered history of contact and movement (see Torabully 1992Torabully , 1996Torabully , 1999Alpers 2000aAlpers , 2000bVergès 2001;Bragard 2008;Lionnet 1989Lionnet , 2008Lionnet , 2009aLionnet , 2009bLionnet and Spear 2010;Desai 2010;Hofmeyr 2010) as well as the migrant trajectories of the writers themselves, these texts play with various intertextual sources, voices and spatial scales to offer fresh ecopoetic possibilities that inhere within spaces compromised by globalization. Radical alterity and an ecological holism: Ananda Devi's La Vie de Joséphin le fou…”

Trade, development and resilience: an archaeology of contemporary livelihoods in Turkana, northern Kenya

“…My central argument is that each of the socio-ecological systems that encompass these diverse strategies of subsistence procurement has, throughout recent history, developed by means of an inherent adaptiveness and ingenuity that has allowed it to be continually reworked and reconfigured in relation to a shifting array of socio-economic, environmental and political factors. Various recent works have challenged the often-implicitly held notion that East Africa was, prior to and during the colonial period, a periphery where broad social change was predominantly derived from external metropolitan centres and encountered only passively (Prestholdt 2004(Prestholdt , 2008Pallaver 2008;Desai 2010;Lane 2010). I build on these works to argue that both during and after the colonial period determinative socio-economic changes in Turkana have been actively community-led and crafted by means of gradually accumulating local knowledge and experience.…”

“Spoken Nowhere but on the Water”: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Lost-and-Found Languages of the Indian Ocean World

“…This region, traversed across a number of novels and covering a variety of periods in Ghosh's oeuvre, also lends new facets to the genre of sea fiction. His oeuvre is filled with maritime journeys that stretch from Durban to Aden to the Andaman Islands to Calcutta to Canton, as Anshuman Mondal in his comprehensive Amitav Ghosh, among others, has described (Mondal 2007;Hofmeyr 2010;Desai 2004Desai , 2010Chambers 2011). These itineraries map a largely forgotten maritime world: as Ghosh himself suggests in an interview, "it really has become my project, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, imagining it, giving it life, filling it in" (Boehmer and Mondal 2012, 7).…”