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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.