Moving beyond a historical approach to understanding Indian Ocean World cultural matrices facilitated by oceanic networks, this research group aims to focus on artistic and embodied practices, linguistic navigations, and literary imaginations to offer a new template for understanding cross-cultural exchanges in the Indian Ocean, especially between Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the contemporary milieu.
With the aim of making Penn State an important academic center for Indian Ocean Studies, this research group proposes to organize two guest lectures and two workshop sessions in Fall 2018 and in Spring 2019 on the following themes: 1) Littoral Imaginings, 2) Navigating Languages, 3) Rethinking Historiographies, 4) Artistic and Bodily Practices.