This webinar is a presentation of a collaborative research project that has recently received funding from Independent Research Fund Denmark. Focusing on community-led infrastructure projects, the project investigates how transregional relations play out in the everyday lives and social imaginaries of Dawoodi Bohras residing in the port cities of Mumbai, Dar es Salaam and Dubai. […]

Following on from and riffing off the previous ‘jam’, this session will continue to explore various ecological understandings of Indian Ocean spaces. Working with the previous session’s shift in focus to oceanic materialities, we will explore how these turns towards the ontologies of the Indian Ocean are registered and represented in various forms of cultural […]

Once understood primarily as a space of social and commercial intercourse, a watery medium across which people, animals, goods, objects, plants, and texts moved between its shores, the Indian Ocean is increasingly being interrogated as a material space. No longer a backdrop across which these mobilities were structured, the ocean itself is being brought into […]

This session is an intervention in theorizing the spatiality of Indian Ocean worlds.  While the field of Indian Ocean studies has grown since the 1980s to provide critical optics for evaluating transnational networks, littoral societies, diasporas and migrations, trade and commodities, Eurocentric paradigms, or cosmopolitanisms, it is comparatively undertheorized—compared to studies of the Atlantic (for […]

The 1989 publication of Éloge de la créolité [In Praise of Creoleness] marked the heyday of the transnational Créolité movement, geared toward the promotion of a Creole consciousness across the Antilles in particular, and across the islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean in general. The manifesto engaged with the cultural and linguistic syncretisms […]