Abstract
The Indian Ocean monsoon has connected coasts and countries of the global south for centuries, in what is thought to be the earliest form of globalization—preceding Europe-driven global networks by up to a thousand years. It is also a storied sea: the history of the Indian Ocean world, as Sugata Bose writes, “is enmeshed with its poetry and in some ways propelled by it”. This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the Indian Ocean connects precolonial and postcolonial societies, in historical as well as imaginative terms. It makes the case for considering fiction as productive of that world, based on the world-making capacities of the novel. The novels considered in the book—by Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen, Joseph Conrad and others—write the Indian Ocean world as a human reality, a dense network and a shifting waterscape. This chapter surveys the historical literature on Indian Ocean networks and introduces the key characteristics and ideas of the ocean worlds to be found in the fiction.
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Lavery, C. (2021). The Literary Indian Ocean: An Introduction. In: Writing Ocean Worlds. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87116-1_1
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