Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa’s experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean’s fertile routes of exchange.
Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi’s southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.
Table of Content
1. Ocean and Narration
2. Old World Orders: Amitav Ghosh and the Writing of Nostalgia
3. Post-Manichaean Aesthetics: Asian Texts and Lives
4. Through Indian Eyes: Travel and the Performance of Ethnicity
5. Commerce as Romance: Mehta, Madhvani, Manji
6. Lighting a Candle on Mount Kilimanjaro: Partnering with Nyerere
7. Anti Anti-Asianism and the Politics of Dissent: M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack
Coda : Entangled Lives
Notes
Selected References
Index
About the author
Gaurav Desai is professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of
Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (2001), editor of
Teaching the African Novel (2009), and coeditor of
Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (2005).
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