Table Of ContentNEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE
Writing Ocean Worlds
Indian Ocean Fiction in English
Charne Lavery
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
Department of English Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Sharae Deckard
School of English, Drama & Film Studies
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of
the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular
kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that
registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical
experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up
the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global
extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new
modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our
particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this
decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. We welcome
proposals for monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots (short
works of 25,000-50,000 words).
Editorial board
Dr Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, USA;
Dr Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada;
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India
Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067
Charne Lavery
Writing Ocean Worlds
Indian Ocean Fiction in English
Charne Lavery
Department of English
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, ZA
WiSER
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, ZA
ISSN 2634-6095 ISSN 2634-6109 (electronic)
New Comparisons in World Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-87115-4 ISBN 978-3-030-87116-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87116-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover image © Marli Steyl, ‘Ocean world’ (oil on canvas)
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Margaret Philip
A
cknowledgements
This book has had several lives, from a doctoral thesis, to the bottom of
the drawer, to the next life you see here. Its resurrection is in large part
thanks to the interest of undergraduate students in Cape Town and
Johannesburg, and the encouragement and preternatural patience of
Isabel Hofmeyr. I have been very lucky to find in her a mentor,
co-conspirator and friend.
Parts of the book were completed during postdoctoral fellowships at
the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, the School of Language, Literature
and Media, and Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER)
at the University of the Witwatersrand. I benefited during this time from
an African Humanities Program grant offered by the American Council of
Learned Societies, which also gave me my first chance to visit Zanzibar. I
spent a year teaching at the University of Cape Town, where head of
department Sandra Young encouraged me to provide in-the-end forma-
tive seminars on Indian Ocean fiction. The final revisions were completed
during a research fellowship at WiSER supported by the Oceanic
Humanities for the Global South project, and during my first year as lec-
turer at the University of Pretoria (UP). I am grateful to colleagues and
friends at UP’s Department of English, and to head of department Molly
Brown for making room for research under difficult circumstances. I am
also grateful for everyone at WiSER, and in particular director Sarah
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Nuttall for steady support and sparking ideas, and Najibha and Adila
Deshmukh for wit and clarity. The Oceanic Materialities crew—Jonathan
Cane, Confidence Joseph, Mapule Mohulatsi, Ryan Poinasamy, Meghan
Judge, Luck Makuyana, Rabia Abba Omar, Zoe Neocosmos, Oupa Sibeko
and Anézia Asse—provided diverse and enriching perspectives. Brilliant
colleagues have offered advice, opportunities and friendship at various
times: Meg Samuelson, Tina Steiner (including a last-minute emergency
read of the fourth chapter), Simon van Schalkwyk, Michael Titlestad,
Hedley Twidle, Pamila Gupta, Phindi Mnyaka, Mehita Iqani, Saarah
Jappie, Sharad Chari and many others.
The Rhodes Trust and the Jones-Everett family (and Charlie the cat)
supported the original research that formed the basis for this book. Elleke
Boehmer supervised the doctoral thesis, provided the original direction,
and was generous with her time and input. The Oxford Postcolonial
Seminar group, run by Elleke and Ankhi Mukherjee, provided intellectual
context, and fellow students—Nisha Manocha, Stephanie Yorke and
Charlotta Salmi in particular—read chapters and provided invaluable feed-
back. Emily McLaughlin, Ben Fulcher, Yasmine Shamma, Alice Lynch,
Liz Chatterjee and others made the early years of this possible and joyful.
So did Noah Scovronick, for whom I’m grateful. Beloved friends have
worked beside and distracted me: Shen Tian, Sam Beckbessinger, Jon
Parsonage, David Francis, Sasha Stevenson, Andrew Craig, Lauren Beukes,
Anz Teagle, Marli Steyl (who also painted the cover), Meghan Finn, Chele
Moyo, Rufaro Dhlembeu, Simone Haysom and others. Lucy Allais and
now Abe Stoll have made me an unexpected and perfect home. My family
is part of this: Patrick cheers and objects; Sean brings gees; Roslyn sorts out
my life; Hannah shores up happiness and confidence; Carol proofreads,
feeds, believes. I wrote the original introduction during a week with my
grandmother in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), with me clicking away at
the keyboard and her clicking away at her knitting. The book is dedicated
to her memory.
A b
bout the ook
Postcolonial literatures are often understood to be national allegories—
focused on the experience of European colonialism and the subsequent
growth of the postcolonial nation. This book presents an account of a
different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in
contrast, is coastal and transoceanic, linking east Africa, south Asia and the
Arab world. In this writing, the “world of the novel” is the Indian Ocean
world, 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 a global scale, and in so doing remap the
world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.
This book examines the distinctive themes and forms of four repre-
sentative writers and their corresponding regions, in whose work the
Indian Ocean is produced as an alternative modernity and cross-national
geography. It focuses on Amitav Ghosh and South Asia, Abdulrazak
Gurnah and East Africa, Lindsey Collen and the Indian Ocean islands,
with Joseph Conrad providing the basis for a study of maritime-imperial
literary precursors. These writers and regions represent the geographical
and imaginative scope of the Indian Ocean world in its pre- and postco-
lonial form. Despite important differences, the fiction taken together
produces the Indian Ocean as what Isabel Hofmeyr calls a “complicating
sea”—complicating how we see the world, and our place in it.
ix
Praise for Writing Ocean Worlds
“In her dazzling study, Lavery incontrovertibly inserts the Indian Ocean as a
robust imaginary space that must be reckoned with in the world-system of modern
fiction. With a keen knowledge of climates, cultures, and histories, Lavery draws
together contemporary authors, notably Gurnah, Ghosh, and Collen, reaching
back as well to Conrad and Melville, to show how they bring to life the far-flung
networks of the Indian Ocean, their inhabitants, and the tangled, unsettling emo-
tions accompanying travel, transport and exchange across this vast and diverse
space. Enriching as well debates on such current critical topics as intersectional
identity, multilingual poetics, and the located history of the senses, Writing Ocean
Worlds is essential reading for novel scholars and for all interested in globalization
and the maritime realm.”
—Margaret Cohen, Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language,
Literature, and Civilization, Stanford University, USA
“This is the Indian Ocean book we’ve all been waiting for. In the silkiest of prose,
Lavery creates a shimmering re-configuration of Anglophone novels on the Indian
Ocean. This study revisits the cardinal points of debates on the novel and world
literature, radiating insights like a dazzling compass rose.”
—Isabel Hofmeyr, Global Distinguished Professor, NYU, USA, and Professor of
African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
“Charne Lavery’s work is an invaluable addition to the growing corpus of work on
space production and cultural representation. By examining the work of major
contemporary writers—Ghosh, Gurnah and Collen—the work offers a rare under-
standing of connected histories that bear the potential of re-centering the Indian
Ocean world and of interrogating received assumptions.”
—Lakshmi Subramanian, Professor of History, HSS BITS, Pilani, Goa, India
“Charne Lavery’s path-opening book offers the first extended study of how the
Indian Ocean has been composed as a world in literary works produced and set
around its basin. In so doing, it presents vital new understandings of how this
oceanic world harbours alternative modernities and opens to non-Eurocentric
futures while shifting the domain of world literary attention offshore and
southwards.”
—Meg Samuelson, Associate Professor in the Department of English,
Creative Writing & Film, University of Adelaide, Australia
