This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and worldAmitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collenalongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.

First full-length study to explore the question of broad literary Indian Ocean continuities and differences Focuses on novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad Examines the intersection of oceanic and maritime studies with postcolonial literature

Autorentext

Charne Lavery is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and Research Fellow on the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: The Literary Indian Ocean: An Introduction.- Chapter 2: Joseph Conrad's Imperial Indian Ocean.- Chapter 3: Amitav Ghosh's Subaltern Sea Histories.- Chapter 4: Abdulrazak Gurnah's African Ocean.- Chapter 5: Lindsey Collen's Oceanic Feminisms.- Chapter 6: Towards a Planetary SeaConclusion.