Short Abstract

Refracting African memory through the Indian Ocean and Black Mediterranean, this panel treats myth, orature and art as archives that refuse containment. What do creative practices along these Oceanic Elsewheres carry that borders and colonial records could not hold?

Long Abstract

Oceans unsettle the certainty of borders. Their waters flow into one another, opening routes despite colonial and contemporary restrictions; carrying language, memory, objects and a spirit that exceeds the archive. Oceanic Elsewheres, turns from the Atlantic, long the dominant frame for Black diasporic thought, towards the Indian Ocean and the Black Mediterranean.

Along the Swahili coast, centuries of mobility have produced cultural worlds spanning Africa and the Indian Ocean (Sheriff, 2017). Black Mediterranean scholarship likewise unsettles fixed mappings of Africa, Europe and diaspora (Di Maio, 2012; Smythe, 2018; Hawthorne, 2022). Writers Khadija Abdalla Bajaber and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and artists Shiraz Bayjoo and Zineb Sedira, render these waters as lived geography, imaginative world and archival fragment. Together they suggest the coast functions as archive.

Read as a prism, the ocean refracts what colonial cartographies presented as a single history into many routes, cosmologies and belongings. The panel draws on elsewhere: geographies outside expected maps of diaspora, from Swahili port towns to cities of the Mediterranean such as Istanbul. In these places Black creatives have found unexpected freedom to work beyond the frames assigned to them.

We invite contributions on oral history, myth, speculative storytelling, ritual, performance, sound and movement as ways of producing and transmitting knowledge. What can critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008), shaped by the Atlantic archive, do in these other waters? How do spiritual worlds enter contemporary practice? Who narrates the ocean, and from which shore? How might collective memory be held without fixing it into a single account?

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