The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction
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 historical 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 identitarian 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.
Kritish Rajbhandari is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. His doctoral dissertation won the American Comparative Literature Association’s Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation in Comparative Literature in 2020. He has published in South Asia, Research in African Literatures, and Comparative Literature and translated two books of poetry from Nepalbhasa.
