Paper short abstract:

The paper compares genealogical writings and commemorations by Mauritians of European, Indian and African descent as statements contributing to a longstanding and ongoing dispute about the meaning of African Indian Ocean belonging

Paper long abstract:

Mauritius provides a privileged field for studying claims to belonging as Indian Ocean African. Geographically, the island is part of Africa, but it had no human inhabitants before settlers and slaves arrived in the 17th century, and the self-understanding of its population has been the object of continuous dispute between groups identifying their descent as respectively European, Indian or African. This is reflected in the independence constitution of Mauritius from 1968, which recognized multicultural alongside individual citizenship rights. While there is little disagreement that Mauritius is actively situated in an Indian Ocean world, it is matter of contestation, whether its national identity within this setting has been formed primarily by European - especially French - colonization, as a ‘little India’ by indentured labourers, whose descendants today make up the majority of the population, or as an integral part of a diverse Africa by the multitudes of slaves brought to the island from Madagascar and Mozambique from the earliest times of human settlement. The paper discusses how such debates over African Indian Ocean identity and the prioritization of different claims of belonging are given expression in a rich literature of genealogical writing and in initiatives to investigate, highlight and commemorate the descent of European, Indian and African Mauritians.

Paper short abstract:

How do poems from Zanzibar challenge literary narratives of “the African Indian Ocean"? Last year, in cooperation with the State University on Zanzibar, we invited 25 poets to compose Indian Ocean poetry. Their verses suggest a critical vocabulary questioning dominant views in Indian Ocean debates.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution seeks to draw perspectives on "the African Indian Ocean" from contemporary Zanzibari Swahili poetry. Although the Indian Ocean has been characterized as a highly diverse multilingual space, mostly English, French and Portuguese literature and typically the novel have been considered to imagine and narrate African Indian Ocean existences. How do literary practices from Zanzibar add to, challenge and change perspectives on belonging, translocal identities and nostalgia? Last year, in cooperation with scholars from the State University on Zanzibar, we invited 25 poets to compose poetry on the Indian Ocean. Their poetry project Zanzibar's oceanic relations from a multitude of astonishing perspectives, which, in my reading, provide us with an alternative and a critical vocabulary questioning dominant views in Indian Ocean literary scholarship and debates. On the one hand, against a romanticist and sugercoated view, they portray the ocean as an exploitable source of income, providing fish and natural resources as well as attracting tourists, promising a better future. But on the other hand, they depict the struggles of fishermen and also worry about the ocean’s ecological fragility, the rising cultural tensions and power struggles linking it to earlier histories of colonial domination. Highlighting the importance of thinking about the African Ocean from a specific place and through culturally specific media and genres, I will show how poetry is deeply engrained in local, specifically Tanzanian, Zanzibari and coastal traditions of poetic discourse and semantics as well as influenced by international rhetoric and government policies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reads selected Indian Ocean novels as representations of the Indian Ocean as a modulator of experiences of separation, entanglements, cultural and human flows; the traumas of slavery and colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Recent scholarship focusing on the Indian Ocean illuminate convergences and divergences of knowledge across different disciplines focusing on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean seas, among others. In the eastern African case and its connections with the Indian Ocean, a growing interest in the larger space of the Indian Ocean Worlds is noticeable from literary, sociological, historical, and anthropological standpoints. At the core of these works is a shared concern with how the Indian Ocean occasioned and modulated experiences of separation, entanglements, cultural and human flows; the traumas of slavery and colonialism, and cultural tensions provoked by autochthonic encounters with oriental and western European religious faiths. More recently, there has been a spike in scholarship that celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit, witnessed in cultures of conviviality, music and dance, art, cuisine, sports, and other forms of leisure as education and leisure as amusement.

This paper, therefore, seeks to speak to these and related experiences. It probes these issues in terms of how they beam light on the creative impulse of the Indian Ocean. It reads selected Indian Ocean novels, namely Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise, Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jehlum to Tana, M.G Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, Peter Kimani’s The Dance of the Jacaranda and Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, as representations of the Indian Ocean as a modulator of experiences of separation, entanglements, cultural and human flows; the traumas of slavery and colonialism.

Paper short abstract:

Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels on the interdependence of the Indian Ocean World and Europe celebrate Swahili history and culture. Does it matter for the recognition of African literature that they have been written not in Swahili but in English and that only 'Paradise' has been translated into Swahili?

Paper long abstract:

Throughout his novels on the interdependence between Europe and the Indian Ocean world, Abdulrazak Gurnah has addressed questions of identity, exile and diaspora. He balances his portrayal of the Swahili world as a region at the receiving end of European colonialism and a site of emigration to Europe and mobility across the Indian Ocean with the portrayal of Great Britain and Europe as regions of immigration and aggressive colonization.

The recognition of global interconnection has not led to Gurnah writing in his mother tongue, Swahili, nor to his novels other than 'Paradise' being translated into Swahili. The author is not going to replace English with Swahili. Swahili speakers who don’t know English have been excluded from a literary celebration of their world that has won global recognition.

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I will broaden the question of ’what it means to be an Indian Ocean African’, and a ’diasporic intellectual’ to the question of African writers in the diaspora and the problematic of language. Is Gurnah’s language choice important for the recognition of African literature? I’ll touch on the practices of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and J. M. Coetzee and their ways in and out of Babel. They have published their latest tales not in English, but in Kikuyu and in Spanish. Both have explained that they have done so to destabilize the global hegemony of English. Like Gurnah, who has lived in Great Britain since his youth, they live far from their countries of birth – Coetzee in Australia, Ngugi in the US.

Paper short abstract:

From the 1930s onwards Punjabi Muslim associations played a role in Swahili religious literature and the circulation of ideas across the East Africa Indian Ocean. This paper will look at some circulating multilingual texts and family-run bookshops in colonial and postcolonial contemporary Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

In the early decades of colonialism, East Africa became—as Thomas Metcalf puts it in his Imperial Connections—“almost an extension of India” (Metcalf 2007, 166, quoted in Green 2012, 131). Urdu, which had been a transregional lingua franca in the Indian Ocean, also became “an African language” (see Green 2011) and, I would argue, the other way around: Swahili, which had been a transregional lingua franca in East Africa, became a language used by Indians on the African continent. From the 1930s onwards Punjabi Muslim associations played a role in Swahili religious literature, book production, and the circulation of ideas across the East Africa Indian Ocean. While locating the intellectual inquiry of this paper in printing diaspora and African literature, I am proposing to look at vernacular Muslim texts that transcend the 'nation' , in which identities are negotiated and transnational communities of belonging are created. This paper will offer a view on India and its legacy in East Africa by looking at some circulating multilingual texts and family-run Islamic bookshops in colonial and postcolonial contemporary Kenya. I will consider how Swahili is articulated in relation to, for example, Urdu, Gujarati and English in a multilingual cosmopolis and how do Muslims intellectuals who define themselves within the Swahili language imagine their local and global belongings.