Comparative Literature

Oruc, Firat; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594787

Although the study of Indian Ocean literary circularities is a relatively new and dynamic field, it calls for alternative paradigms for global literary history in light of the nascent conversation between comparative world literature and oceanic studies. Following the creative work of prominent writers of the Indian Ocean (including Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), the concept of literary circularities is anchored in the study of multiple intersecting and networked sites of exchange, circulation, migration, and encounter in this vast oceanic space that has mediated a dynamic cross-cultural traffic across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In response to the territorial logic of old and new comparative literature, the polysemic nature of the Indian Ocean invites the following the question: what would world literature look like when terracentric biases of the field are unsettled? In other words, how does the thalassological poetics of the Indian Ocean also remap approaches to literary categories themselves? The Indian Ocean’s literary waves and the generic wateriness they create offer a set of analytical categories as they rescale narrative as a living, moving, recombining, recycling practice of memory, connection, and connectivity.

Vierke, Clarissa; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594800

The Swahili poetry of the master poet Fumo Liyongo, which dates between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, draws much of its imagery from the Indian Ocean, and in a particularly sensuous way: the poems paint baroque tableaux of Swahili material culture, evoking multiple elsewheres. They conjure the Indian Ocean through tastes, scents, and views of its rich interiors, which delineate a distinctively coastal world implicated to different degrees in the vaster oceanic region. Borrowing from aesthetic theories, the article explores the poem’s sensuality as a productive way of “thinking” about Indian Ocean relations, namely as a continual reemergence of cycles of sensation, questioning the clear-cut dichotomy of the “exterior” world and “intimate” notions of irreducible personhood as well as notions of local and cosmopolitan. Zeroing in on the betel quid, which has turned into a “mythological” cultural node of Swahili identity as well as a prominent rhetorical topos of Swahili love poetry, this article explores its imaginative productivity.

Cooppan, Vilashini; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594813

The circulatory connectivity that defines the Indian Ocean as critical object also inheres in objects themselves and the descriptive economies surrounding them. Combining regional chronotopes, the thingly imaginary of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and world literature, this essay explores how a close encounter with objects, stories, and descriptive language can reveal the form and poetics of the Indian Ocean. A concept of regional relationality, encompassing both connectivity and narratability, emerges alongside the liquid reading of Indian Ocean fluidities. Linking descriptive chronotopes of the region to By the Sea’s object worlds and the words that carry them, the essay links a single instance of Indian Ocean literature to larger speculation about the regional object itself. Tracking flows of space, time, memory, affect, description, and narration as they cut across the novel and the region, the author pursues the hermeneutic possibilities of a notion of circulatory form.

Rajbhandari, Kritish; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594826

This article explores the representation of multilingual Indian Ocean pasts in novels by Amitav Ghosh and Abdulrazak Gurnah, two key contemporary postcolonial writers from the opposite shores of the ocean. It theorizes the historical impulse in the novels as anarchival drift, which refers to the self-conscious mode of rewriting the past that subjects the archive to the instability and fluidity of the sea. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2006) and Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) both tell stories of forced displacements in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean; both rewrite colonial archives in order to depict cross-cultural interactions, employing various self-reflexive textual strategies that draw attention to the linguistic and archival mediations operating in those encounters. This article examines these textual moments alongside the novels’ archival sources—specifically, nineteenth-century colonial dictionaries and Swahili travelogues—to argue that the self-reflexivity results from the multiplicity of linguistic registers on which these texts operate, making visible the translative processes imbricated in transoceanic historical forces. While both novels appeal to the linguistic aspects of cross-cultural interactions, the article traces the divergent ways in which the semantic drift among languages stage the materiality and historicity of trans-oceanic encounters.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594839

This essay argues for creolization as a salient theoretical and historical category for Indian cultural history that can offer an epistemic alternative to its land-centric bias. Through literary analysis of Franco-Tamil author Ari Gautier’s novel about Pondicherry, Le thinnai, it demonstrates how creolization theories need to be adjusted to capture and evaluate the cultural transformations which took place in enclaves such as Pondicherry, founded between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries on India’s coasts by a range of European powers. Equally, it deploys literary critical methods to illuminate how, and why, fiction such as Gautier’s reactivates memory of Creole Indias. This reading reveals his privileged trope of the “thinnai,” a veranda-like architectural element of Tamil homes, as working together with the embodied culture of Pondicherry’s “Bas Créole” community, to present the enclave as a contact zone for creolization of cultural materials that converge here through two, overlapping circularities: the transoceanic and the littoral. The specific epistemic structure generated through their intersections, that I call “the archipelago of fragments,” moves us away from the double bind of territoriality and caste-based preference for purity while opening Indian cultural history to the porosity of the coastline and the unpredictability of creolization as cultural process.

Obeegadoo, Nikhita; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594852

Nestled in the Mozambique Channel, the island of Mayotte is an overseas department of France, wrenched away from the Comoran archipelago in 1975. This act of colonial mutilation gave birth to an ultra-peripheral “French” territory that persists as a beacon of hope for Comoran clandestine migrants, thousands of whom have perished on the treacherous sea crossing since 1995. In her novel Tropique de la violence (2016), Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah inscribes the Mahoran tragedy within a global imaginary of migration. This essay explores the risks and merits of such a comparative approach: as Appanah’s references to the Mediterranean “migration crisis” foster transnational empathy, do they simultaneously reproduce the colonial gaze? After all, the polyphonic novel does not give a voice to the Comoran migrant herself. Is this a gesture of narrative violence, or a way of forcing us to confront silences that can never be filled? Through a series of detailed close-readings, the essay argues that Tropique de la violence takes a nuanced and often ironical approach to the facile equivalences between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (in terms of migratory tragedy), as well as between Mayotte and France (in terms of political status). This exploration culminates in an examination of the novel’s own complex positionality as a French-language novel written by a Mauritian author about Mayotte. Simultaneously branded as too foreign and yet not foreign enough, Tropique de la violence both embodies and exceeds Indian Ocean circularities.

Gui, Weihsin; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594865

This essay argues that contemporary literary anthologies of Indian Ocean narratives offer a distinctive way of representing the diversity of voices and experiences that traverse the ocean and connect the different countries and cultures along its rim. Whereas the single-author historical or historiographical novel is often the focus of Indian Ocean literary scholarship, this essay examines Ways of Being Here and Wave after Wave, anthologies produced under the rubric of Indian Ocean mentorship and writing projects by the Centre for Stories located in Perth, Western Australia. While the anthologies do share some thematic similarities with Indian Ocean novels, this essay draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s thinking to argue that the anthologies have a tidalectical aesthetic connecting their different individual pieces, which unfolds as readers move through their pages. This tidalectical aesthetic, in which there is no resolving synthesis but rather a series of interconnected and overlapping lived experiences and emotional struggles produced by multiple authors, may be a better way of representing contemporary Indian Ocean narratives that circles back to issues of migration, racism, and resistance at the very southeastern edge of the Indian Ocean.

Qadir, Neelofer; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594878

Popular rhetoric of the twenty-first century as the “Asian century” frequently coheres around China as a rising global superpower and thus focuses on its financial and material ambitions in sites across Asia and Africa. Such narratives, ensconced within the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) formation, re-entrench a problematic Orientalism while pushing further to the margins still the complex, long-standing regional histories. This essay juxtaposes Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and Kevin Kwan’s Rich trilogy in relation to Indian Ocean histories of trade and exchange. Through world-historical events activated in these novels such as World War II and the first Anglo-Opium War, the essay’s argument follows nineteenth- and twentieth-century transits between the South Asian subcontinent, the Malay Archipelago, and China. Taking circularity as a central analytic, this essay reveals how an elongated temporal frame that accounts from non-European vantages—even in contemporary Anglophone literature—reorients not only what we consider the past and present of Indian Ocean worlds, but also how those pasts bear on the contemporary.

Lionnet, Françoise; Oruc, Firat; Lionnet, Françoise

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9594891

The continued strategic importance of the Indian Ocean has led to contests over the sovereignty and integrity of its islands and territorial waters. Francophone Mauritian writers have been vocal about a situation they have denounced as unacceptable. Their literary engagement with our fragile planet and its species offers strong aesthetic responses to urgent political impasses. Ananda Devi’s eponymous character Joséphin entertains a relation with the Indian Ocean that can be read as a layered parable of the end of man. Her novel is a brilliant poetic translation of Michel Foucault’s view of history careening toward the vanishing point of the human as well as a powerful echo of traditional Hindu cultural beliefs about the continuum between human and animal life-forms, about rebirth and regeneration. For Édouard Maunick, the island itself is the site of a creative beginning, where new forms of culture and identity are created in the crucibles of colonization and creolization. For Marie-Thérèse Humbert, ocean waves are the ambivalent vector of a rebirth that returns the island and its occupants—human, animal, vegetal and elemental—to a utopian state of uneasy equilibrium beyond the lies and vagaries of neocolonial dispossession.