Sea Log : Indian Ocean to New York 9781138088337, 9781315109923

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“May Joseph’s itinerary is singular but worldly, tending toward an otherworldliness where plenty bursts through colonial scarcities, where plenum pierces the One in everyone, where pleriplus is the genre of shared refuge in mobility. Her lyric, sharply analytic Sea Log is unprecedented and unanticipated in how it immediately establishes its absolute necessity. How else would we know how to sound the sound of the Indian Ocean as it washes New York shores?” Fred Moten, Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts “Historically revealing, and politically attuned to the ongoing moment of decolonization, May Joseph’s Sea Log brings us to the Indian Ocean and its archive of colonial affects, brilliantly meeting the necessity for understanding the geopolitical crises of climate and environment. Taking us across coastal regions between Asia and Africa, Sea Log is an intimate and lyrical encounter with the other-­than-human that also critically engages the inhuman. Powerful and poetic, this book is a moving rendition of what is lost and mourned, and what remains and inspires.” Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Sea Log

The ocean has always been the harbinger of strangers to new shores. Migrations by sea have transformed modern conceptions of mobility and belonging, disrupting notions of how to write about movement, memory and displaced histories. Sea Log is a memory theater of repressive hauntings based on urban artifacts across a maritime archive of Dutch and Portuguese colonial pillage. Colonial incursions from the sea, and the postcolonial aftershocks of these violent sea histories, lie largely forgotten for most formerly colonized coastal communities around the world. Offering a feminist log of sea journeys from the Malabar Coast of South India, through the Atlantic to the North Sea, May Joseph writes a navigational history of postcolonial coastal displacements. Excavating Dutch, Portuguese, Arab, Asian and African influences along the Malabar Coast, Joseph unearths the undertow of colonialism’s ruins. In Sea Log, the Bosphorus, the Tagus and the Amstel find coherence alongside the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to historians of transnational communities, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology of space, area studies, maritime history and postcolonial studies. May Joseph is Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, where she teaches a walking history of coastal New York. Joseph is Founder of Harmattan Theater and has produced site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes. Joseph’s other books include Ghosts of Lumumba (2019), Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (2013) and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (1999).

Changing Mobilities Series Editors: Monika Büscher, Peter Adey

This series explores the transformations of society, politics and everyday experiences wrought by changing mobilities, and the power of mobilities research to inform constructive responses to these transformations. As a new mobile century is taking shape, international scholars explore motivations, experiences, insecurities, implications and limitations of mobile living, and opportunities and challenges for design in the broadest sense, from policy to urban planning, new media and technology design. With world citizens expected to travel 105 billion kilometres per year in 2050, it is critical to make mobilities research and design inform each other. Mobilities Design Urban Designs for Mobile Situations Ole B. Jensen and Ditte Bendix Lanng Dialogues on Mobile Communication Adriana de Souza e Silva Elite Mobilities Edited by Thomas Birtchnell, Javier Caletrío Bicycle Utopias Imagining Fast and Slow Cycling Futures Cosmin Popan Cycling A Sociology of Vélomobility Peter Cox Sea Log Indian Ocean to New York May Joseph For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Changing-­ Mobilities/book-­series/CHGMOB

Sea Log

Indian Ocean to New York

May Joseph

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 May Joseph The right of May Joseph to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-08833-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10992-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

For Dad, of the Indian Ocean Mother, who never left its swamps And Celine, who lives with its hauntings

Contents



Preface: decolonial periplus Acknowledgments



Introduction: writing Anthropocene

Part I

x xvi 1

Navigations

13

  1 Indian Ocean affect

15

  2 Sea of shock

30

  3 Ocean ontologies

40

  4 Contested visuality

50

Part II

Periplus

75

  5 Cochin, Dhow City

77

  6 Dar es Salaam, socialist utopia

84

  7 Hanoi palimpsest

99

  8 Bamiyan pillage

110

  9 New York: archipelagoes of the unseen

124

10 Deciphering the Indian Ocean

134



Index

140

Preface Decolonial periplus

Sea log: Bongoyo Island, 1974. Dark green murky depths, choppy waters, a receding coastline in the morning sun. My pre-­teen head is tipped over the catamaran’s edge, entranced by the frothing wake. It is my first boat ride on the Indian Ocean. Amidst the chatter of schoolchildren, the chugging of the craft and the blustery wind, a great stillness captures my imagination at the sight of the vast Indian Ocean expanding before us. The soaring elation of land, sea and sky with island is unforgettable. This is where I belong, my young mind thinks. My thoughts wander to that other history of African peoples at sea. Staring deeper into the black-­blue ocean I see clear jelly fish in playful plenty, their translucent floating mass a drifting presence. I am immersed in the deep, cold, green Indian Ocean; I taste its salty dryness of lip and skin. Behind me lies the receding view of my hometown, Dar es Salaam, strung out along its picturesque bay of colonial and modern buildings. German, Portuguese, Anglican and Arabic influences are etched into the town’s façade, serene and langorous. Ahead, an island arises like an apparition. Along with it appears a seafaring world whose histories beg to be deciphered. Periplus: a navigational account of a seafarer; it is the documentation of hydrographic information, observations and personal reveries of early sea travelers, inscribing wonder, ambition or despair. The colonial archives are inundated with the sea logs of colonizing European men facing their phantasms and grappling with their fears amidst the malaria and heat of new geographies. Fernand Braudel, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, writes: Coastal navigation. The sea in the sixteenth century was an immensity of water … empty as the Sahara … Navigation in those days was a matter of following the shore line … moving crab-­wise from rock to rock, from promontories to islands and from islands to promontories. This was costeggiare, avoiding the open sea.1 Close contact with the shores of new continents generated stories that crystalized particular emotions with landscapes. Heat and pathology in the tropics. Untrammeled licentiousness in the islands of Asia. As these colonial accounts became

Preface   xi accessible, new perspectives surface on the impact of human agency in the historical understanding of postcolonial sensibilities. Writing in the Amsterdam of the 1660s at the height of Dutch colonization of 600 entrepots by the Dutch East India Company—including New Amsterdam in North America, and Cochin in India—Benedict de Spinoza lays out his theory of affect. In his book Ethics, Spinoza defines affect as an action, a passion.2 Affect encompasses the emotions, but it is more than that. It is the extended processual transformations of human and nonhuman natures on the human mind. Spinoza writes, “By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.” Affects for Spinoza are caused by external causes, like “waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate.”3 Spinoza’s theory of affect captures the mood of imperial Europe in its state of affective aggression. The yet to be discovered world of the global South lies outside what is known. In Spinoza’s words, the fate of Europe is entwined in the unfolding struggle for human potentiality to be played across the colonies. In Spinazoan terms, it is the era of anthropogenic agency.4 Caught in the throes of cataclysmic climate anomalies such as monster storms and acidic seas, the Indian Ocean raises the urgency to revisit Spinoza’s call for the study of the affects. However, this study is located across the aftershock of the colonial encounter; across the coastal regions between Asia and Africa. The need to study the nonhuman lives of the Indian Ocean has escalated with the climatological and aquatic crisis, which disturbs older maritime arrangements. Even as scientists and ecologists contend with the fragile ecosystems of the global South, the urgency to better understand our anthropocenic histories presents itself through the sea’s compromised ecologies. Colonial remains, eroding coastlines, monsoon deluges, toxic waterways, contaminated fish—all of these present a coastal ecology that is under atmospheric threat on both sides of the Indian Ocean. Added to the nonhuman symptoms of the impact of human agency on the environment must be the largely invisible but voluble spheres of affective imaginaries—the largely unexplored junctures of land and sea along the South Asian and East African coasts. What does it mean to live by the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea in South Asia or in Tanzania? How might we begin to piece together the assemblage of multidirectional memory that has constituted the materiality of coastal ways of being?5 Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” offers pathways to enter this zone of affective histories. His concept draws attention to “the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance. Thinking in terms of multidirectional memory helps explain the spiraling interactions that characterize the politics of memory.”6 The Indian Ocean is one such place. Here, the intersections of migrancy flow among colonial incursions and the small lives of sailors, traders and administrators, along with their cooks, concubines and slaves. All interface with the shore, the wind and the currents of the ocean. Ashin Das Gupta alerts us to the fact that the constructed idea of a singular, unified space called the Indian Ocean was a military invention, crafted as a

xii   Preface bound colonial space for Europe’s project in pillage.7 Gupta emphasizes that the Indian Ocean has always been a crucible of fluid mentalities, of connectivities across other oceanic geneaologies. Colonization narrowed the Indian Ocean’s interpretive power. Hence the task of producing affective histories is only now beginning to be explored. Sea Log is a buoy in that larger oceanic conversation of fluid mentalities addressing climatic and seafaring affects that have shaped the world around the Indian Ocean.8 In the face of rising oceans and catastrophic atmospheric implications, it is an awakened response to the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire’s prescient warning to engage the forgetting machine.9 I began this project as a sea log that swells from within the undertow of becoming. It is a periplum of dream-­work. These writings are written from the periphery of the periphery, the barrier islands of the Malabar Coast, the forgotten archipelago of New York City and the now peripheral Second World sites that were woven into a Second World modernity shaped by maritime histories: Dar es Salaam, Cochin and Hanoi. They seep out of maritime spaces. Sea Log is a process of writing erasure drawn from seascapes of loss and shorelines of erosion. It probes the potentialities of the Indian Ocean’s swirling lines of drifts.10 This is what Giorgio Agamben identifies as the potentiality to know, to bring knowledge into actuality. In the face of a disappeared watery archive of the Indian Ocean, such a project in potentiality is more the exploration of an “ability” to know by making a work. Sea Log is such an investigative actuality; a work of interpretive intersectionality. It is the scrutiny of an ontological shock archive. This project embraces a decolonial methodological approach. Deployed by Walter Mignolo, the word “decolonial” argues that the “post” in the word postcolonial entails a set of discourses—such as reason and the civilizing mission— that are held hostage by the projects of enlightenment. Mignolo foregrounds the de- in decolonial as a catalytic prefix that contends with the legacies of modernity within settler colonial cultures.11 Mignolo’s use of the word decolonial gestures to Sylvia Wynter’s postulation that to effectively engage with the anthropocenic impact of the last millennia, we who have been designated “less than human” within history need to grapple with more demanding deconstructive prefixes than the “post” in postcolonial.12 The challenge of deploying discourses that dialectically engage with the stranglehold of Europe haunts this project. Sociologist Stuart Hall’s remark that “there is no place outside the whale”13 coheres with what historian Dipesh Chakrabarty acknowledges in Provincializing Europe: The question of postcolonialism itself is given multiple and contested locations in the works of those studying Southeast Asia, East Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Yet, however multiple the loci of Europe and however varied colonialisms are, the problem of getting beyond Eurocentric histories remains a shared problem across geographical boundaries.14 Toward this ongoing theoretical future, the decolonial methodology holds to the fire the challenges for rethinking the very premises of any epistemological

Preface   xiii framing indebted to enlightenment thinking. And yet, I concur with Chakrabarty’s assertion that “we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past.”15 From the standpoint of the United States, in its current state of unreason, environmental deregulation and a political climate of science deniers, the basic tenets of enlightenment discourse appear to be in great threat of dissolution.16 The only way forward is a critical, capacious commitment to fight these nihilistic voices while also accounting for the overlapping histories that have brought anthropogenic accountability to its cataclysmic edge. “I go, we go,” writes Helene Cixous. “On the way we keep a log-­book, the book of the abyss and its shores.”17 The essays in this book began as boat logs, travel notes, poems, jottings, flash fiction and fragments of memoir in a self-­ ethnographic project on the Indian Ocean affect between East Africa, the Middle East and the Malabar. A new environmental awareness, what Edmund Husserl would call “environmenting,” has arisen around the Kerala coast over the past two decades; a new historical accounting is presenting itself.18 It is the elusive Spinazoan project of probing the affective mentalities of the forgotten Indian Ocean shoreline, ghosted by forts and ruins. It is a project in ontological habitation. In Spinoza’s compendium, shame “is a sadness, accompanied by the idea of some action of ours which we image that others blame.”19 Repentance, Spinoza notes, is a sadness accompanied by the idea of some deed we believe ourselves to have done from a free decision of the mind.20 It seems to me that Spinazoan shame is strewn across the Indian Ocean littoral, still devastated from its millennia of Arab and European pillage, marked by heavy fort masonry from the fifteenth century onward. Spinazoan repentance, however, has been absent in its affective potentialities, despite its archives, its meticulous record keeping. No apologies, no embarrassment, no reparations; this appears to have been the brutal way forward in the aftershock of colonization. Consternation, Spinoza says, “is attributed to one whose desire to avoid an evil is restrained by wonder at the evil he fears.”21 I grew up amidst Portuguese dungeons and the Dutch battery in East Africa and the Malabar Coasts, and traces of this landscape are also present along the Hudson River in New York. The consternation toward Europe’s barbarity cultivates the affective energies of this book. My preoccupation with the Indian Ocean and its extended aquatic identity with other oceanic flows sparked the writing of this book, but now, an escalating, politically terrifying scenario of Hindu rightwing communalism is sweeping across the Indian political spectrum, haunting the ecumenical syncretism of the Malabar region. Vocal and increasingly persuasive, the heavy hand of political authoritarianism, fascistic volatility and physical violence is impinging on the daily lives of minorities across India. This makes a study of the Malabar region’s particularly syncretic history even more incendiary and pertinent. At the moment, there are many forces within Indian politics working to destabilize the globalized history of the subcontinent’s coastal consciousness. The sites discussed in this book are in particular tension with the Hindu nationalist agenda,

xiv   Preface and are facing threats at every level: psychological, physical, historical and political. More immediately, this is taking the form of political intimidation and the systematic squeezing of constituencies out of their heterogeneous and multi­ directional historicities. A new narrowing of the Indian political imaginary is producing an unprecedented shoe-­horning of India’s vast and multiple ontological trajectories into the singular narrative of a fundamentalist Hindu India, whose emergent scenarios are fascistic in implication. Consequently, an ontological excavation of the migrancy, derailments, miscegenations and detournements of human and nonhuman potentialities of coastal Southern India from the perspective of the Indian Ocean which straddles multiple worlds, is particularly necessary and timely. This book is one sea log in a compendium of imperfect Indian Ocean trajectories within the subcontinental archive. Here, the melding of shame, repentance and consternation inflect observations on the anthropogenic impact of colonization on the Indian Ocean.22

Notes   1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 102.   2 Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 70.   3 Spinoza, Ethics, 103.   4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197.   5 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2009), 11.   6 Rothberg, Multidirectional, 11.   7 Ashin Das Gupta, “Moreland Hypothesis” in Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K.S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995).   8 I draw the word “mentalities” from the Annales School historians George Dube and Lucien Febvre.   9 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 10 Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 11 Walter Mignolo, “Coloniality of Power and Subalternity,” in The Latin Amer­ican Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodríguez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 224–244. 12 Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:1 (Winter 2002). Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. eds. Vera Lawrence and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). Also see Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice” in Ex-­Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992), 237–279. 13 Stuart Hall, lecture at Oxford School for African Studies, 1990, St. Hughs, Oxford, UK. 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 17. 15 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 211.

Preface   xv 16 Sumit Sarkar, “The Fascism of the Sangha Parivar,” Economic and Political Weekly 27:5 (January 1993). 17 Helene Cixous, “Preface” in The Helene Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), xvi. 18 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 157. 19 Spinoza, Ethics, 109, 115. 20 Spinoza, Ethics, 108, 109. 21 Spinoza, Ethics, 111. 22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.”

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “On Potentialities.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-­Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Césaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cixous, Helene. The Helene Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge, 1994. Das Gupta, Ashin. “Moreland Hypothesis.” In Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, edited by K.S. Mathew. New Delhi: Manohar, 1995. Husserl, Edmund. “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965. Mignolo, Walter. “Coloniality of Power and Subalternity.” In The Latin Amer­ican Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Mignolo, Walter. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:1 (Winter 2002): 57–96. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Sarkar, Sumit. “The Fascism of the Sangha Parivar.” Economic and Political Weekly 28:5 (January 1993): 163–167. Spinoza, Benedict de. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice.” In Ex-­Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye Cham. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992.

Acknowledgments

As I complete this book, my dear friend and inspiration Meena Alexander has tragically passed away. Alexander’s formidable opus on the Indian Ocean was a propelling energy on Indian Ocean thinking, and remains a bell buoy on the tempestuous seas. The idea for the Sea Log book surfaced on arrival at a new port, New York, nearly three decades ago. I had just performed She Tries Her Tongue alongside the Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Phillip at the University of Santa Cruz in 1991. Reading simultaneously beside NourbeSe Phillip was a performative act of undoing that would take years to actualize into Sea Log. A cup of tea that year in the California sun with mesmeric East African film theorist, the late Teshome Gabriel, sowed the desire to metaphorically follow the Nile, and see what happens. Manthia Diawara, thank you for your visionary tran-­saharan thinking during the 1980s that opened up questions about citizenship and the sea. I remain indebted to the late Derek Walcott who generously shared thoughts on writing and the Caribbean Sea with me in London during the late 1980s. Conversations with Ngugi Wa Thiongo revived memories of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam in ways that led to the writing of this book. To Yvette Christiansen I am indebted for challenging me to grapple with the stylistic derailments of the Indian Ocean, where lyricism, sociology and memoir blur. Sea Log is the moldy accumulation of ideas whose sources are indebted to many scholars, artists, friends and family. Thank you Patricia Hoffbauer for our conversations about Pernambuco and the Portuguese in Brazil which helped me make the initial connections to the East African and Malabar histories. Allan De Souza, your photographs of Asians in Kenya concretized this project. Many long conversations with Smriti Srinivas about Sai Baba in East Africa disinterred my thinking on the Indian Ocean. A seminar I co-­taught with Michael Taussig on Ethnographic Surrealism in 1993 heightened questions of poetic form, ethnography and the experimentations with ficto-­criticism. Mark Nowak gave me my initial forum for this work in his path-­breaking journal XCP: Cross-­Cultural Poetics. Gaurav Desai, Jasbir Puar, Barbara Browning and Brian Larkin, your endorsement at a vulnerable time is always remembered. Co-­teaching with the exacting Tina Campt sharpened my visual eye. Bob Holman, Kristen Prevallet, Marjorie Tesser and the Bowery Poetry Club allowed me an innovative place to play with words. Sanjay Subramanyam, Ann Cvetkowicz, Avery Gordon,

Acknowledgments   xvii Lauren Berlant, Tom Bender, Patricia Clough, David Ludden and Michael Gilsenan opened up new terrains of thinking. Janet Abu-­Lughod taught me how to approach fieldwork in geographically dispersed locales. Ben Lee offered me intellectual harbor to think through volatility as historical modality. To Patricia Clough I owe the inspiration to graft the poetic with the psychoanalytic, to take chances. Saidiya Hartman was a formidable interlocutor in pushing the challenges of writing about the inarticulable. Rob Wilson helped me rethink why we write, and how landscapes transform our writing. Brian McGrath, thank you for teaching me how to read the coastline. Nica Davidov, many thanks for your extensive knowledge of Dutch maritime history. Peggy Phelan’s work on mourning was influential in my approach to thinking about forts. My teacher, the late Cedric Robinson was a sparkling presence in thinking through the strains of black marxisms influencing the history of the oceans. Jack Tchen, Margo Machida, Una Chaudhuri, Tayyab Mahmud, Amitava Kumar, Percy Hintzen, Jean Rahier, Stephen Muecke, Devleena Ghosh, Ranjini Majumdar, Ira Bhaskar, Gayathri Gopinath, Andrew Ross, Toby Miller, Ben Lee, Dilip Gaonkar, Arjun Appadurai, Larry Grossberg, David Lelyveld, Raka Shome, Russell Leong, Stanley Thangaraj, Sangeetha Ray, Stefano Harney, Ella Shohat, Bob Stam, Patty Dann, Roddey Reid and Lisa Bloom, thank you all for your friendship, mentorship and support of my work over the years. Jason King, a big thank you for your memorable photographs of Forodhani School. To Neferti Tadiar and Jon Beller I owe much gratitude for support of my work, through my affiliation with Barnard College, which funded the travel research for Harmattan Theater’s performances that are the fieldwork sources for this book. A special shout out to the Indian Ocean Worlds collaborative of Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ngweno and Neelima Jayachandra, who offered me a community and intellectual context from which to wade into the Indian Ocean fearlessly. Nethra Samarawickrema, Nidhi Mahajan, Jeremy Prestholdt, Pedro Machado, Anuj Vaidya, thank you for being generous readers of my work. At Pratt, my wonderful colleagues made it possible for me to create an idiosyncratic book that is born of a truly interdisciplinary environment. Lisabeth During, Johanna Oksala, Francis Bradley, Carl Zimring, Jennifer Telesca, Luka Lucic, Ethan Spigland, Randy Donovitz, Amy Guggenheim, Jennifer Miller, Ellery Washington, Uzma Rizvi, Karin Shankar, Ann Holder, Zat Jamil, Arlene Kaizer and Wendy Muniz, thank you all for your incisive ideas, support, friendship and convivialities. Ira Livingston, your daring experiments with writing continue to give me permission to play with form. To Gregg Horrowitz, deep thanks for allowing me funding to research this book. Macarena Gomez-­Barris, you brought renewed energy to this manuscript with your close read. Thank you for shaking up my world, compelling me to rethink and rewrite. Jack Halberstam, I am indebted to your work on the queer art of failure for my decision to go with the heart. Lindon Barrett, Jose Munoz, Randy Martin and David Van Leer, you are sorely missed and always remembered. To Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Christina Sharpe and Patricia Clough I owe much gratitude for agreeing to review my manuscript. Michael

xviii   Acknowledgments Ryan, your provocations made this a better book. Suresh Dhas, a big thank you for reading my work. Sara Cohen, Zhivka Valiavicharska and Anitra Grisales, your editorial suggestions were crucial to this project. Ankita Nalavade, thank you for research support. Kristen Prevallet, a special thanks for your mentorship, advice, inspirations and incisive poetic eye that sharpened this manuscript. Across the oceans, Adam Grydehoj of Copenhagen, Phillip Hayward of Sydney, Duarte Santos of Madeira, Pamela Gupta of Johannesburgh, Burak Pekoglu of Istanbul, Margaret Grebowicz of Siberia, Helene Jeanine and Clarence Boulay of France, Alana Ruben of Jerusalem, Sofia Varino of Berlin and Viju James of Delhi, you are my family of displaced islanders, thank you for sharing your worlds strung along many seas. To Sulaiman and Najma Gool and the Kimmie families of Cape Town, this book would not have materialized without your extraordinary hospitality and humor. In India, the friendship and love of my friends V. Geetha, Priya Alburquerque, Gayatri Shetty, Burjor Kothawalla, Geetha Rajan, Dimpy Krishnan, Munira Jamal, Ashish Sen, Nahid Alikhan, Ambika Nair, Saritha Hegde, Fenn Jacob, Anita Cherian, Elsa Alexander, Elias Kohra and Radha Ravindran kept me anchored. I began writing this book as an excuse to stay connected with you all. I also had to write this book because India breaks down all theorizing in the face of its multiplicities. The only way to grasp its infiniteness is to attempt to write about it. Thank you to Pratt Institute, Dean Andrew Barnes, and the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies for supporting my travels and research through all the years. The Faculty Development Fund at Pratt allowed initial research support to visit the Dutch East India (VOC) Archives at The Hague. The School of Liberal Arts and Sciences funded research at the Rijksmuseum and the Shipvaarten Museum in Amsterdam; the Fundao da Oriente and the Torre de Tombo in Lisbon; the Library Nazionale Marziano in Venice; the Cheraman Juma Masjid and the Dutch Forts along the Malabar; and the National Museum of Maldives, in Mahe. Thank you also to the patient staff of the Princess Firyal Map Library at the New York Public Library for all their help. A special thank you to the Custodian of the Cheraman Juma Masjid, Mr. Faizal, and the Curator of the Masjid’s museum, Mr. Shroff, for so generously spending their time speaking with me about the Masjid’s early history. I am indebted to the generosity of the antiquarian Eduard Van Dishoeck of Amsterdam for sharing his family history and medieval maps, regarding the Dutch East India Company in Batavia and India. Thank you, Mr. D, for the chance meeting across continents. To my cousins along the Kerala Coast, Beryl Nevis, who is my native informant for all matters of Thangassery, Blazy Correya of Cochin’s Bolghatty Island, Cliffy Correya of Vypin Island, Angel Abreu of Dutch Square, Alleppey, my dear mother Celine Netto who lives on Ashtamudi Lake, Quilon, and Josh Therratil of Ernakulam, I thank you all and remain in your debt for knowledge of Kerala history. The recent devastating Kerala floods make this book even more timely, alas. This book would not have become what it is were it not for some very special travel friends. Sofia Varino, Alana Ruben, Marit Bugge and Burak Pekoglu,

Acknowledgments   xix thank you for walking with me across the world. Diane and Chris Powers, I owe you eternal thanks for dragging me to Sarnath, Bodh Gaya and Varanasi. It changed my life, and this book. Gloria Zimmerman, a big thank you for the many glasses of wine, and brutal edits, that lie behind these pages. To my brother Allan, thank you for dutifully reading my drafts between surgeries. Your astute critiques are always on the mark. A special thank you to my wonderful editors Gerhard Boomgarden, Mihaela Ciobotea and Pip Clubbs at Routledge, for your enthusiasm and efficient, supportive editorial assistance in making this book happen. My father’s entertaining unpublished memoir of Tanzania in the 1960s, “My Story” was a fascinating source for this book. I am deeply indebted to my mother, my most avid reader, and former school teacher of African history at Forodhani School, and later Shaaban Roberts Secondary School in Dar es Salaam. Thank you, Mom, for dragging us kids on those long car trips to Bagamoyo and Fort Jesus in Mombasa. Your love for the Quilon swamps in the Malabar remains unfathomable. This book is an effort to make sense of that most peculiar affect that engulfs coastal Kerala, of mold and colonial seafaring traumas. To Jaya and Car, thank you for the precious photos of our apartment in Dar, which was the visual prompt for this writing. Ali and David, thank you for teaching me architecture, all the better to comprehend our fractured maritime lives. Finally, my deepest gratitude to my family, Celine and Geoff for being my harbor, and my dog JJ, who does not like puddles, let alone seas, but ensures I get in a walk by the Hudson River every day. Earlier versions of essays in this book appeared in the following publications: “Hauntings at The Hague” in Travellin’ Mama edited by Charlotte Beyer, Janet MacLennan, Dorsia Smith Silva and Marjorie Tesser. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019. “Archipelagoes of the Unseen” in The Aesthetics of Necropolitcs edited by Natasha Lushetich. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. “Frugality and Urban Life” in Urban Design Ecologies Reader edited by Brian McGrath. London: Wiley and Sons, 2013. “Globalization, Modernity, and the Avant Garde” in The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora edited by Saloni Mathur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. “Old Routes, Mnemonic Traces” in Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges edited by Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. “Globalization, Modernity, Performance” in The Third Body edited by Martin Hager. Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2004.

xx   Acknowledgments “Afro-­Arab-Asian Imaginings” in Problematizing Blackness: Self-­Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States edited by Jean Rahier and Percy Hintzen. London: Routledge, 2003. “Frugality and the City: Hanoi Palimpsest” in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis edited by Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach. London: Routledge, 2002. “Fanon, Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh” Women and Performance, July 2006. “Cochin: Nerve of the World” Architectural Design, Fall 2005. “Hanoi Palimpsest” Xcp: Cross-­Cultural Poetics Issue 8: 27–39, 2001. “Old Routes, Mnemonic Traces” The UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing (Indian Ocean Issue) Vol. 6 Issue 2: 44–56, Spring 2001. “Frugality and the Urban” New Observations, Summer 1999. “Asian Mysticism and Soho Chic” Xcp: Cross-­Cultural Poetics, Spring 1999.

Introduction Writing Anthropocene

Gerazani, Dar es Salaam, 1974. Along the coastal road, the sea air with its salty comfort enveloped my morning walks to primary school. Crumbling German colonial buildings combined with Portuguese and Arab architectural details lent my daily trek an otherworldly charm. As young cadres, for the most part, our daily classes consisted of marching every morning and sweeping the school yard while trying to get a little learning done amidst paper rockets. Perhaps most instructive to my future scholarly preoccupations was time spent dancing ngomas on the coastal road, waving flags at visiting dignitaries and wandering along the seashore with neon ices in acts of minor truancy. We waved flags at Obote, Kenyatta, Karume, Kaunda, Mobutu. We were children born into the economic delinking project. While we did not know the word decolonial, we were practicing decolonials in an affective sense. All schooling was in Swahili with few books to be seen. Our sole education seemed to be focused on inventing an imagined, new postcolonial socialist state out of the trauma of colonialism—its nascent cultural practices focused around inhabiting Dar es Salaam’s coastal identity. The Indian Ocean is a particularly dense ecology of epistemological knowledge production. During the period identified by Paul Crutzen as one of the phases of the Anthropocene, it was a crucible of escalating European colonization, as well as the site of entrenched anti-­colonial resistance.1 Crutzen identifies the 1800s—the period of colonization and industrialization—as one accelerating phase in the proliferation of human impact upon the planet. This exponential spread of human degradation across the substrates of the planet was viscerally embossed by imperial Europe along its maritime colonial ports. Colonialism wrecked ecological devastation upon biopower, as well as marine and biotic species. The building of massive colonial constructions in the form of prisons, dungeons, forts and security walls along coastal waterfronts left a trail of environmental detritus generated by Europe across the shorelines of formerly colonized cities of the world.2 Sea Log is a feminist investigation into the affective tremors of migration and displacement strung across some of these ports and forts, between the abyss of the nonhuman and the shores of potentiality. What Sigmund Freud calls the “sea-­foam” of experience.3 My earliest memories are of long walks with my father along the Indian Ocean seashore of Gerazani in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We always walked

2   Introduction barefoot, shoes in hand. Dad believed it was good for the feet to feel the crisp, cool sand. Pointing to the large ship anchored at the Dar es Salaam harbor at dusk, he would hold me in rapt attention, recollecting his tumultuous sea journey from Bombay to Dar es Salaam in the steerage of the State of Bombay in 1955. Traveling at the peak of the monsoon, it was a formative, traumatic sea journey in which he left the known to travel the Black Waters of the Indian Ocean. It was also a politically backward journey from independence in India to colonial servitude in Tanzania. The shock of arrival at an entirely new continent across the sea ricocheted through my childhood.4 My father’s tales of tempestuous waters, delirium from seasickness, convulsions, heat and thirst, nausea, disorientation, colonial melancholia were the dinner conversations which frequently brought us back to apocryphal sea journeys, with all their anxiety, loss, fear and optimism. My first sea log. I was born in postcolonial Tanganyika the year of independence from the British. The tumult and growing pains of decolonization alongside the project of nation building shaped the Swahili coast of my youth. The sea around Dar es Salaam, the haven of peace, was an emotional construct as much as it was a visual space of liquid modernity. Consequently, the shore, the sea and the Indian Ocean acquired a materiality that exceeded its fluid reach. The ocean was a lake between Africa and India. The challenge to articulate its syncretic interiorities was a daunting one. The only way forward was to glance at the past while propelling into futurity, like the Sankofa bird found engraved on one of the coffins in the African burial ground in downtown New York.5 This sea log is a pithy entry that documents a sea journey as it transforms into a somatic account of affect linking shorelines across the Indian Ocean over millenia. Part chorography, part navigational fabulations about the materialities of experience within the ongoing hidden economies of colonization’s hauntings, it navigates effervescent spaces. As living ecologies of ongoing historicities, these coastal sites are highly volatile loci of meaning existing between what Trouillot calls, “[that which] happened and that which is said to have happened.”6 They bring to the fore his observation that, “The ways in which what happened and that which is said to have happened are and are not the same may itself be historical.”7 Engulfed in the chasm between what happened and what was said to have happened, Sea Log is an excavation of repressions and desires that shape the ontology of space across the devastated coastal landscapes of the global South, where forts and ports were violently forged by the Dutch and Portuguese, and, in the case of the Indian Ocean, still contaminate their promontories.8 The Indian sociologist Satish Deshpande observes that it was only in the 1950s that inquiries around modernity were academically available to non-­ Western societies of Africa and Asia—this region was, by definition, considered to be non-­modern.9 Deshpande underscores that much of the work done on the non-­West during the first few decades of decolonization were conducted by predominantly Western anthropologists investigating “primitive” cultures, or orientalist scholars excavating the past of once-­great civilizations.10 Of relevance to Sea Log is Deshpande’s observation that this meant the privileging of a Hindu

Introduction   3 India, which cohered with the Indian nationalist project in the post-­independence phase. Deshpande writes: By the early decades of the twentieth century these varied traditions had already produced a considerable body of works on the arts, sciences and cultural-­religious practices of classical Hinduism; the cultural coherence of Indian/Hindu or aboriginal communities … this diverse body of largely anthropological work on India did not show any deep or sustained interest in social change. Indian independence brought along with it a rigorous engagement with modernity and social transformation; however, much of the historical probing revolved around questions of nationalism and the fissures attending the tenuous project of the modern nation-­state. The predominance of the subcontinental North and the interior, as opposed to coastal geographies in much of the scholarship on South Asian histories, meant a certain ecological shape informs the kind of questions emerging from South Asian scholarship of space and place. Questions of loss and the recovery of the self, as Ashis Nandy frames it, become open invitations yet to be thoroughly explored by scholars from India’s geographic south, particularly by women and minorities outside the framework of Hindu India.11 Interrogating the competing strands of the contemporary with the non-­ modern, as Nandy offers with his notion of “retrievable selves,” and Sudhir Kakar offers with his psychoanalytic wrestlings with modern Indian subjectivities, gestures toward the vastly untrodden material ruins of affect within which the quotidian in India still coexists, particularly along the Southern coasts.12 In his essay “Freud and the Non-­European,” Edward Said captures the challenges of thinking through the ambivalences of affect and the non-­European. In a careful reading of Sigmund Freud’s articulation of the “other,” Said lays out the intricate terrain of the recognizable “other” of Europe, which undergirds Freud’s archive. Said writes, Like most of his contemporaries, Freud knew that other, noteworthy cultures existed and deserved recognition. He referred to those of India and China, for instance, but only in passing and only when, say, the practice of dream interpretation there might be of comparative interest to the European investigator of the subject.13 To Said, the place of minor histories, histories of the other, triangulates a contradictory historical path with uneasy detours into the ontologies of fragmentation, exile, dispossession. It is within this deep catechresis, or slippage, within the psychoanalytic method regarding spheres of the globe designated the non-­West (or non-­modern as Nandy phrases it), that I embark into this vast and rigorous repository of historical and economic analysis. In formulating his theory of rhythm analysis in “Seen from a Window,” Henri Lefebvre asks:

4   Introduction To understand and analyze rhythms, one has to let go, through illness or technique, but not completely. There is a certain externality which allows the analytical intellect to function. Yet, to capture a rhythm one needs to have been captured by it. One has to let go, give a language, one only really understands meanings and sequences by producing them, that is, by producing spoken rhythms … in order to hold this fleeting object, which is not exactly an object, one must be at the same time both inside and out. A balcony is perfect for the street .…14 Drawing on Lefebvre’s provocation, I ask: what happened outside my mother’s balcony in Cochin, looking out over barrier islands and across the Indian Ocean?15 As a diasporic, feminist, Afro-­Asian Amer­ican subject now resident in New York, this is not a question that was articulable to me before this point in time. The sort of rhythms that my question raises, particularly the mobilities of the multiply migrated, miscegenated, Christianized, Indian Ocean island communities off the mainland of Kerala, that comprise the archipelago of the Malabar Coast, are the forgotten minor histories of the subcontinental mainland.16 Delegitimated within the narrow framework of Hindu India, and territorially bound Indian nationalism, my question sets me adrift on Fred Moten’s “rickety boat” along the swamps of the Malabar archipelago whose routes across the Indian Ocean inform its many minor histories off the Kerala coast.17 These peripheral, ocean-­bound histories lack the cohesive trackability of the land-­ bound demographics around which a sustained, if ruptured, articulation of Indian history has been constructed. Comparable to the Gullah Islands of the Carolinas in the United States, in cultural marginality and particularity, the Malabar/­ Coromandel coastal area disrupts the current fascist political historiography of an ancient, organic, Hindu India.18 The affective structures of potentiality for decolonial histories is a treacherous project filled with caveats and theoretical pitfalls. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe lays out some of the minefields of such an undertaking, most notably the risk of nostalgia which he calls the “sin of all sins.” Yet, the anxiety Chakrabarty locates in the analytical project of minor histories is precisely the repressed sign of the non-­modern. With its diaries, ethnographies and sea logs, Europe is allowed its nostalgias; those outside Europe are confined to the rigorous argumentation of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the “other” wise.19 Europe is allowed its confessions, its obsessions and its poetic derailments; but the non-­modern is forever held in the precarious charge of proving its rationality, its rights to citizenship and sovereignty, and its abhorrence of nostalgia.20 In his Vienna lecture of 1935, Edmund Husserl discusses this ontological anxiety as foundational to his exegesis on the crisis of European man: If, then, we follow historical connections, beginning as we must with ourselves and our own nation, historical continuity leads us ever further away from our own to neighboring nations, and so from nation to nation, from age to age.… It is like a sea in which human beings, peoples, are the waves

Introduction   5 c­ onstantly forming, changing, and disappearing, some more richly, more complexly involved, others more simply.… This becomes immediately evident as soon as, for example, we penetrate sympathetically into the historical process of India … that is strange to us.21 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s response to Husserl is, “Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze?”22 Aimé Césaire responds to such a hailing in an earlier era with The Discourse on Colonialism, and asks on what terms? The terms of enlightenment rationality that produced the hideous forts and dungeons along the coasts of the Indian Ocean littoral, including the Malabar? Chakrabarty’s approach to this conundrum is to take Husserl’s charge seriously and follow the traces toward the already lost histories of the invented past. In his essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Chakrabarty compounds Husserl’s nervousness by stating that as a species, we humans have jumped over the stumbling blocks of difference to present a different scalar anxiety, one where all humans now comprehend that we share the same futures, the same catastrophes: Yet climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally call it a “negative universal history.”23 It is distracting that just as the histories of the peripheries begin to be told, a new crisis of modernity once again sweeps under the rug of history the untold, uninterrogated gaps of minor histories. It appears that the way forward is to simultaneously navigate the particularity of Spinazoan consternation, with the grand arch of impending futurity. It is in the furrowed crests of the shoreline that some histories of the periphery might broach the longue duree of universal history. The Haitian historian Michel Trouillot encapsulates this dilemma. If pastness is a position, Trouillot argues, how might one begin to retrieve knowledge of the past “without prior knowledge or memory of what constitutes pastness?”24 Trouillot argues that in no way can one assume a simple correlation between the magnitude of events as they happened and their relevance for the generations that inherit them through history.25 The colonization of the Malabar Coast by the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, forced into motion a series of convergences and dispersals—these are some of the disappeared silences and tactile rememberings that Trouillot calls “ongoing traumatism.”26 For Trouillot, the decaying ruins of the Palace fort of Sans Souci in Northern Haiti bear the terrible burden of slow memory, buried amidst the forgotten history and contemporary travails of modern Haiti. I walked in silence between the old walls, trying to guess at the stories they would never dare tell. I had been in the fort since daybreak.… I wanted to

6   Introduction tiptoe alone through the remains of history. I touched a stone … I stepped across my dreams up to the pile of concrete.… I opened my eyes to the securing sight of the Citadel standing tall against the sky. Memories are made of stone …27 Trouillot’s memory-­history equation is an invitation to widen the inquiry into the memories of nature. The great swath of oceanic detritus ensconced between the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean presents unexamined structures of what Husserl calls “environmenting.” For Husserl, nature and the environment have agency as much as humans. Environmenting in Husserlian terms is the activation of sentient potentiality within the non-­human. It is the accounting of the vibrancy of the natural world as a phenomenal place. Environmenting endows nature with agential capacity. Within a Husserlian ontology, the ocean is alive in its densities, its fluctuations, its fluid reactivity to anthropogenic impact. Sea Log traces fragments of environmenting that circulate around the imagined and real intersections of different maritime periods influencing the Indian Ocean littoral. Living around the Indian Ocean is to live within the remains and hidden histories of different water-­bound societies. Now distanced from sea-­ bound imaginaries of thousands of years, our understanding of these ecological landscapes are impoverished by the partial narratives afforded by the histories of modern nations and their territorially bound geographies.28 Discontinuous yet concatenated, these environmenting histories share an ongoing somatic affect of violence and forgetting. Sea Log crafts an affective journey into the fractured associations that inform Indian Ocean knowledges.29 It steers an itinerant investigation into the effervescence sprung between the East African and Malabar coasts. Untethered, ruptured and migrant shards of environmenting, Sea Log journeys the folds through which an Afro-­Asian feminist consciousness peregrinates the first decades of decolonization during the 1960s. Such a history is impossibly palimpsestic. Strands of historical connectivities. Threads of buried archaeologies. Always the body immersed in a language of the occular, grappling to be read against the disruptions of global migrancy. Amidst literal and figurative entries at ports of embarkation and transit, I tease out the juxtaposed resonances between multiply located histories and their spatially dispersed readings of decolonial becoming. As a feminist subject violently produced through Portuguese, Dutch and British colonizations, my hauntings located me at multiple sites of historical pillage that shaped my particular affective imaginary. These uneasy convergences shaped my preoccupation with land and water interfaces across forgotten maritime routes. The question shaping this inquiry is the following: Do surviving ruins of the colonial past just provide backdrops for contemporary urbanization, or are they animate participatory spaces that continue to inform contemporary psychogeographies today?30 Former colonial metropoles became open, excavatory spaces of contestory affect. Facing the ghosts of history in their ruinous contextual frames make possible intricacies of inchoate becoming.31

Introduction   7 In his influential paper on the Southern question, Antonio Gramsci observes that the invention of the Italian state looks very different from the perspective of the islands and Southern regions of Italy.32 Taking a similar approach, Gyanendra Pandey raises the question of what the narrative of the Indian nation-­state might look like from the perspective of its deep Southern states, which occupied very similar positions to the invention of modern India as the role of Sardinia to modern Italy.33 This rhetorical move made in the 1970s opens up the very tenuous and contentious roles that India’s southern coasts on both the Coromandel and Malabar sides, have played in the Indian national imaginary. The case of the islands of the Kerala coast, with their Indian Ocean influences, have largely been marginalized in the ensuing postcolonial accounting of minor histories of national import. In the post-­independence era, the importance of peasant histories of the geographic North and the examination of what constitutes modern India privileged the figure of the subaltern as the legitimate subject of the Subcontinent’s conflicted histories. The cultural hegemony of a predominantly Hindu India with a Muslim minority during the first decades of independence deligitimated the mongrelized, non-­assimilationist trajectories of the minor islands skirting the Malabar shores. These largely peripheral coastal societies with their syncretic histories of cultural hybridity over millennia were swept into the fervor of inventing a singular nationalist narrative of the unified Hindu state, with a reluctant gesture toward its minority Muslim population. Recent incendiary rhetoric by Narendra Modi’s government has inflamed this binary construct. Minority ethnic presences comprising the secular political identity of India, whether Christian, Bahai, Budhist, Zoarashtrian, Arab, African or Jewish, have been doubly peripheralized. They have been relegated to an increasingly shadowy existence of delegitimacy. In this fear-­induced climate of national belonging, the Malabar Coast has been positioned as at once Indian, and threateningly un-­Hindu in some culturally inauthentic sense.34 The amalgamated cultures of the Indian Ocean impinge on the contemporary Indian imaginary as both historically an afterthought, and geographically peripheral, as their coastal realities are subsumed under a largely land-­bound historicity shaped by the politics of Delhi and the culturally hegemonic Indian north.35 The comprehension of the coastal regions of South India as an archipelago with a vast and varied history of cultural transformations that have produced highly nuanced and syncretic histories of becoming is only gradually materializing.36 What little cultural understanding is available of the Indian Ocean region of the subcontinental South is largely documented through its political formation as a Marxist, communist state within the struggles of Indian nationalism.37 Historically and geographically, the Kerala region is a complex arrangement of barrier islands, with attenuated relationships toward its mainland both culturally and physically. Until recently, it has largely been absorbed into the history of the mainland and its nationalist political futures. Toward that minor history, Sea Log is an embodied engagement with what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as a project in “provincializing Europe.”38 It takes as its departure point the detritus of colonization and the enlightenment project,

8   Introduction with its prisons, its dungeons, its terrifying fortress walls and its violent genetic detournements. Sea Log flows from inside the pathology of unfinished narratives, submerged memories of silenced pasts. It takes seriously the resulting environmenting hybridizations of Jewish, Arab, African, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Syrian, Indonesian and British influences, wrought over long duree, to pursue the question of what the contours of an Indian Ocean affect might begin to entail across its convergences and shorelines. I draw on the work of Christina Sharpe, who eloquently traces the idea of “wake work”—the intricate unearthing of world making that continues to structure landscapes, peoples and social histories in the interrupted spaces between the hideous past of colonization, and the voracious present of neoliberal state formations.39 For modern migrants such as myself whose lives are shaped by the very structures of older ocean-­bound journeys but are iterated into discrete national articulations, a deeper investigation of the intersecting currents, flows, sea travels and maritime histories presents a subterranean world of startling continuities in geographically far-­flung locales. What complicates this fragmented reconstruction of the numerous pathways that shape coastal cultures is their very heterogeneous influences and consequences. So many cultures passed through colonial port cities that it is impossible to weave a singular cohesive thread into a particular maritime locale’s cultural imaginary. Instead, one can only dredge up miniature snapshots of floating memories—­ considerably deteriorated by the passage of time, sea salt and oceanic winds, but nevertheless connected to contemporary lives unfolding within the striated present. There is a growing public discourse on the ongoing somatic affects, cultural impact and deep rooted syncretism that shaped the Malabar Coast from Muziris down to Kanyakumari. It begs a theoretical accounting. Yet, a silence very much shaped by both the regions history and its culture of shame, attends the legacies of coastal syncretism. It is indicative of the marginalization of India’s seafaring communities in the national imaginary. The past is harnessed commercially for marketing purposes. Its interiorities, its materialities, its psychosomatic continuities are less visible in the public realm as objects of study. Such a slow and resistant undertaking to remap distant conjunctures, dreams, fears and violent rendezvous that cumulatively produced a coastal history of the present Indian Ocean regions, disinters too many specters along the Malabar. Nevertheless, to wander along the shoreline is to be immersed at once in the interconnected, but now disassociated, skeins of affect from their ocean-­bound pasts. Writing multidirectional oceanic accounts into the maritime repository forces a recalibration of forgotten routes within the national imaginary. It forces open the uneasy relationships between coherent official narratives, and the itinerant, discontinuous and fitful interruptions of landscapes, ecologies and peoples that occupy the coastal Malabar over millenia.40 Living amidst the ruins of Second Temple Jewish migrations, Roman ports, Phoenician sea journeys, Dutch urban planning, Portuguese fort-­city logics, African deities, Venetian canal culture, Omani seafaring techniques and Chinese technologies of fishing along the

Introduction   9 Malabar Coast drew my attention back to the churn of the Indian Ocean’s maritime pasts, and its sunken relevance to our ecological futures.41 What began as a historical excursion into the archaeological residues of the Malabar region of South India morphed into a project in montage history of multiple moments mapping a fractured social imaginary through the self-­ethnography of one emergent feminist subject. Straddling East Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North America, this is an affective engagement with the materiality of the archive from within the ocean’s vortex. A restructuring of narrative knowing out of the eddies and currents of ocean flows, it stirs the twisted interwovenness of history’s violence into new choreographies of ontological possibility. These vignettes are the dissolved residues of Indian Ocean networks, shaped by colonial sea journeys, ghosted by the ruins of empires and morphed ontologies. They are a critical analysis of affective shock that reverberates across sea memory. A deterritorialized perspective offering excavations of modes of knowing in the tangled web of colonization, conquest and post-­national reinvention. In these pages, history is more surreal than fiction. Rumor is an enlightening ripple in the colonial archive. Between the gaps of affect, repressed stories drift to view. The slough of modernity.

Notes   1 Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, (Jan. 3 2002).   2 K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Comprehensive Study of the European Impact of Asia, from Vasco da Gama to the Mid-­Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1969). Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India from the Origins to ad 1300 (Gurgaon, India: Penguin Books, 2002). Sanjeev Sanyal, The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History (Gurgaon, India: Viking, 2016).   3 Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), 2.   4 Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival (Boston: South End Press, 1996).   5 Sewell Chan, “Coffin’s Emblem Defies Certainty,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2010.   6 Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 3.   7 Trouillot, Silencing The Past, 8.   8 Jos Gommans, Lennart Bes and Gijs Kruijtzer, Dutch Sources on South Asia, c. 1600–1825. Bibliography and Archival Guide to the National Archives at The Hague (The Netherlands) (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2001). M.O. Koshy, The Dutch Power in Kerala, 1729–1758 (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989). N.S. Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery (New Delhi: Penguin Press, 2010).   9 Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003), 31. 10 Deshpande, Contemporary India, 30. 11 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 12 Sudhir Kakar, Indian Identity (New Delhi: Penguin Press, 2007). Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 13 Edward Said, Freud and the Non-­European (New York: Verso, 2004), 15. 14 Henri Lefebvre, “Seen from the Window” in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 219.

10   Introduction 15 Lefebvre, “Seen from the Window.” The term catechresis, meaning misuse, is used by Gayatri Spivak as a deconstructive reading technique to imply slippage in language. I find the word helpful in its applied sense of incomplete meanings, unfinished articulations, that arise within the postcolonial context. 16 K.S. Mathews, “Introduction” in Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K.S. Mathews (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 8, 9. Mathews notes that the coastal and island communities along the Malabar Coast experienced very different impacts as a result of navigational and maritime histories, from those communities further inland. Mathews also underscores, “The mingling of various races in and outside wedlock” along the Malabar Coast, whose social histories are less documented in their phenomenological fullness. 17 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 259. 18 L.A. Krishna Iyer, Social History of Kerala Vol. 1 – The Pre-­Dravidians (New Delhi: Indraprastha Press, 1968). Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 19 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 20 Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (New York: Penguin Books, 1953). 21 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 157. 22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, talk in Sweden. 23 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter, 2009). 24 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 14. 25 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 16. 26 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 17. 27 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 31. 28 May Joseph and Jennifer Fink, Performing Hybridity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 29 Smriti Srinivas, “Somatic Regimes of Citizenship in Nairobi” in In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden: Brill Press, 2008). Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Patricia Clough, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 30 Patricia Clough, The End(s) of Ethnography (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013). Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 31 The work of Michel Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand and Sylvia Wynter offer vocabulary to embark on such work. 32 Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question, 1926” in Selections and Political Writings (1921–1926), ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). 33 Gyanendra Pandey, “Voices from the Edge: The Struggle to Write Subaltern Histories” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2012), 293. 34 Susan Visvanathan, The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). 35 David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Introduction   11 36 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Attempt to Consolidate” in The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 216–217. Subrahmanyam’s study sheds light on the shift in power from Calicut to Cochin, and the rising importance of Quilon as a seaport. See also Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 252–253. 37 Ashis Nandy, “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin” in Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). 38 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 39 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 40 Pandey, “Voices from the Edge,” 288. 41 Susan Vishwanathan, The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Bibliography Alexander, Meena. The Shock of Arrival. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Bayly, Susan. Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Berlant, Lauren, ed. Intimacy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Chan, Sewell. “Coffin’s Emblem Defies Certainty.” New York Times, January 26, 2010. Clough, Patricia, ed. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Clough, Patricia. The End(s) of Ethnography. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Crutzen, Paul. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (January 3 2002): 23. Deshpande, Satish. Contemporary India: A Sociological View. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. On Dreams. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gommans, Jos, Lennart Bes and Gijs Kruijtzer. Dutch Sources on South Asia, c. 1600–1825. Bibliography and Archival Guide to the National Archives at The Hague (The Netherlands). New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2001. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections and Political Writings (1921–1926), edited and translated by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978. Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965. Iyer, L.A. Krishna. Social History of Kerala Vol. 1 – The Pre-­Dravidians. New Delhi: Indraprastha Press, 1968.

12   Introduction Joseph, May and Jennifer Fink. Performing Hybridity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Kakar, Sudhir. Indian Identity. New Delhi: Penguin Press, 2007. Koshy, M.O. The Dutch Power in Kerala, 1729–1758. New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989. Lefebvre, Henri. “Seen from the Window.” In Writings on Cities, edited and translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Ludden, David. Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lukose, Ritty A. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Machado, Pedro. Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Madhavan, N.S. Litanies of Dutch Battery. New Delhi: Penguin Press, 2010. Mathews, K.S., ed. Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History. New Delhi: Manohar, 1995. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Nandy, Ashis. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nandy, Ashis. The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Nandy, Ashis. Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. Pandey, Gyanendra. “Voices from the Edge: The Struggle to Write Subaltern Histories.” In Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. London: Verso, 2012. Panikkar, K.M. Asia and Western Dominance: A Comprehensive Study of the European Impact of Asia, from Vasco da Gama to the Mid-­Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. The Confessions. New York: Penguin Books, 1953. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-­European. New York: Verso, 2004. Sanyal, Sanjeev. The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History. Gurgaon, India: Viking, 2016. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Srinivas, Smriti. In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement. Leiden: Brill Press, 2008. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Thapar, Romila. The Penguin History of Early India from the Origins to ad 1300. Gurgaon, India: Penguin Books, 2002. Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Visvanathan, Susan. The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Part I

Navigations

1 Indian Ocean affect

It is 1972. I am staring into a frightening dungeon made of concrete inside a ­forbidding Portuguese fort, Fort Jesus, in Mombasa. Called an oubliette (from the French verb Oublier, which means to forget), the dungeon is built into the fort’s deepest foundation. It terrifies me. I hear the guide’s voice say that they threw the Mau Mau and other radical natives into the pit and threw away the key. From what I could see, it was a long way down, and clearly, no key was used to open the pit. It was a cavernous opening into a place of forgetting. I begin writing this book as a receptacle of forgetting, of little moments of colonial violence that otherwise would recede into the oubliette. The oubliette of Fort Jesus initiated my fascination with the crevices of history, the forgotten pits that enveloped my childhood. What sort of a culture would build such hideous monuments to human aspiration? Strangely, these thick walls of fortification also structured the childhood of my parents, who grew up in former colonial towns in India, particularly Fort Thangassery and Fort Cochin. The ruins of this now forgotten past are strewn across the frugal modernity of the contemporary, slowly emerging 1960s of East Africa. It was hard to ignore the glaring violence that had shaped the port city of Dar es Salaam’s past.

Deterritorializing the oceanic I walk along an old beachfront off a forgotten pathway in old Bagamoyo, Tanzania. I wander amidst the thick columned slave posts that comprised one of the largest slave markets in East Africa. Entirely deserted, but marred by scratches and indentations in the stone surface over time, this terrifyingly silent place is testament to the rich history that can be gleaned from a casual walk to the ocean. Distractingly languid, forcefully modernist, the socialist era imagination of Tanzania had no time for looking to the remnants of the past with their haunting reminders. The trans-­oceanic impact of crossings on this sleepy town that shaped the world was tangible. Trans-­oceanic: a matrix of connectivity across oceanic imaginaries. Trans-­ oceanic: at once of many oceanic spaces. The concept of the trans-­oceanic is a spatial framework of analysis that allows the scales of oceanic crossings to intersect with the more discrete organization of area studies around singular ocean

16   Navigations bodies: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. It opens up the temporal and spatial coordinates that mark singular bodies of water as defining conceptual paradigms.1 The seas and oceans have accrued a history of conquest and militarization over time. A thick overlay of imperial memories shape the language of oceanic thinking. Decolonization and post-­independence movements have opened up new ways of considering oceanic spaces. Post-­nationalist approaches to the borders of the sea and the attending oceanic expanses of water demand a fresh rethinking of the navigational past. The space of the trans-­oceanic foregrounds comparative, interdependent histories of the different bodies of water across the planet. Trans-­oceanic inflects singular colonial narratives and post-­national histories of the coast and the attenuating water bodies toward an inter-­woven and networked space of oceanic convergences. The trans-­oceanic is a de-­territorial space; it forces a larger planetary understanding of the future of oceanic possibilities. It grafts the histories of postcolonial theorizing with those of decoloniality. Subaltern theories of history are dragged into the vortex of Latin Amer­ican calls for a decolonial methodology.2 As a casual study of the Malabar region makes evident, there are startling relationalities between the Lusophone Americas and South Asia’s coastal histories that surge to the surface of oceanic preoccupations. The Malabar is mapped in a relational space to other Lusophone navigational imaginaries in sixteenth-­ century maritime frameworks.3 At once, the contemporary histories of Latin America, with its Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonial pasts, become enmeshed in the flows and fluxes of the Indian Ocean’s confluences: the food, biotic migrations, human flows, administrative histories and environmental contaminations experienced through shared coastal degradation during the colonial period. The trans-­oceanic galvanizes meanings across ocean constructs. It shrinks the mental imaginaries between bodies of water and allows for dynamic juxtapositions. Through the notion of the trans-­oceanic, Latin Amer­ican arguments for de-­coloniality become a relevant concept to the formerly Portuguese coastal littorals of the South Asian region. First, there are the cultural linkages to Latin Amer­ican political imaginaries via Portuguese colonization; second, there are the liberation theologies and Marxist historiographies which open up shared political genealogies of oppression and struggles for liberation. Having remained largely peripheral to the nation building movements of South Asia, these coastal regions continue to remain in states of unprocessed, syncretic decoloniality that need to be ontologically unpacked.4 The trans-­oceanic undercuts the militarily constituted identities of colonial sea empires, through which port cities of the global South were forcefully engendered. Trans-­oceanic is a palimpsest ­construct—at once, time forward and time past, blurry in its expansive spread yet inclusive in its shared ecological futures. Deterritorializing the oceanic is a necessary path toward understanding the comparative coastal cultures of the world.5 For much of modern history, a sizable portion of Africa and Asia was pillaged across oceanic routes, fueling the

Indian Ocean affect   17 wealth of Europe. There are systematic, highly managed and well archived engagements in pillage across the global South. These remain tangible along farflung coastlines—from Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, to Fort Jesus, Mombasa; from Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, to Galle on the southern coast of Sri Lanka.6 The hundreds of colonial entrepots of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and much later, British colonization, led to the ecological scarring of over three fourths of the planet’s shoreline, now absorbed into the modern urban landscape. The colonial past courses through the contemporary environment as ruin, tourist heritage site and forgotten grave.7 It is a challenge for those who live within the ramparts of the old fort cities and ancient port traces to comprehend the extent of the visual history marking the landscape as a ghosting.8 The idea of the trans-­oceanic is one construct that opens up the otherwise isolated, localized point of colonial devastation. Drawing on a deterritorial aesthetic of oceanic thinking from the perspective of water, trans-­oceanic knowledges become a prism through which to reenter the space of the present.9 The Indian Ocean swells in its persistent, aqua pelagic ruination to ask what sorts of interiorities were havocked upon the societies of its coastal provenances? Engaging the Indian Ocean from a decolonial, feminist perspective shocks the customary narratives of oceanic journeys whose goals were frequently trade or conquest, into alternate histories of affect.10 As I write this from the Muziris coast of the Indian Ocean, Sudhir Karkar is calling for a connective imagination that empathizes, cathects and interjects environmental trauma through a decolonial praxis. His plea resonates along the Malabar Coast.11

Muziris as site of trans-­oceanic ontologies Coastal syncretisms Growing up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, along the white sandy shores of the Indian Ocean, father would point across the water and gesture toward the horizon saying, “India is thaaaat way.” Standing fifty years later on the balcony of my mother’s home in Cochin at the Indian Ocean’s edge, I throw open the window to the searing orange light of dawn. “Theeeere is Dar es Salaam. Repository of happy memories. Of childhood. Of awkward teen years. I have to get across one day.” Crumbling fort walls of Portuguese solidity frame the waterfront of Fort Cochin near my parents’ home. Once a major colonial fort port for the Portuguese, then later the Dutch, the city of Cochin now maintains Fort Cochin as a repository of the historic past. The waters around Cochin are placid with a dark, murky hue. Gray, green and opaque, light bounces off the ripples whipped up by the diesel boats ferrying people to work and back across the archipelago. A distinct odor of toxic fumes lingers around the dock as the ferry swings by the quay to pick up commuters heading home. Standing at the potholed little quay waiting

18   Navigations to catch the boat, the aura is one of time in its own frame. I am reminded of Fred Moten’s poignant image of “the rickety boat.”12 Nothing arrived here swiftly. Nothing leaves in haste. The mold assails everyone. Contemporary coastal identities along the Kerala coast have burgeoned in symbiotic yet distinctive epistemological frameworks alongside the rest of India. The geological isolation of Kerala across the Annamalai Hills and its connectedness to the Eastern shores of the Coromandel through the oceanic routes has shaped the syncretic, intermeshed identities along the Malabar Coast.13 Consequently, the hegemonic articulation of social identities in relation to the Indian nation-­state and the Central Government located in Delhi have always been in tension with the material realities of the past and future of the coastal regions along the Laccadive Sea.14 The striking disconnect between the land-­bound articulations of belonging espoused by Indian nationalism in its post-­independence political formation, and the vernacular iterations of belonging and identities that coexist across the coastal littoral of the Malabar, speak to the need for a more capacious approach to thinking about coastal imaginaries. The history of the Malabar Coast alone is so encrusted with trans-­oceanic influences and cross-­ cultural impact over centuries that a simple nation-­state gloss does not begin to unravel the impact of oceanic epistemologies on Malabar identities today.15 The Malabar is one of the world’s richest repositories of trans-­oceanic influences across antiquity, and is of considerable medieval import. To study the Malabar at once connects one to the Maldives, and to the East African coast. To use Timothy Morton’s metaphor, one is enmeshed in linkages to New Amsterdam as well as to Batavia, Pernambuco and Macao.16 The far-­flung port cities that now exist within national formations have deeper urban planning and historical connections to each other than they frequently do with other cities within their respective national imaginaries. This fractured coexistence of multiple layers that structure the imagined futures of these sites complicates the methodological and mnemonic techniques of writing place into a phenomenology of the Indian Ocean. Driving South from Kodungallur (formerly Cranganore) to Quilon along the old coastal road of the Malabar Coast of South India, one is immediately drawn into the varying ontologies of the Indian Ocean: Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Marxist, communist, Secular Modernist.17 To anchor this decolonial undoing is the startling, serene figure of Karumadikuttan, the Black granite Buddha of Ambalapuzha, Alleppey. Dated to the ninth century ad, the Buddha, dramatically cleft in half by some unknown calamity, was dredged out of Karumadi Thodu, a stream, in the 1930s.18 Seated in meditation and facing the backwaters of Kerala’s archipelagic ecology, the Black Buddha of Ambalapuzha is a concrete manifestation of the competing ontologies shaping the water-­bound region. Over 2,000 Kuttanad ducks float around the ancient Buddha, the sun glinting off their backs. Violently hewed in half, the stone Black Buddha embodies very fundamental gaps in the history of knowing through which an understanding of the Indian Ocean has to be undertaken along the Malabar. Its cleaved body and forgotten

Indian Ocean affect   19 resonances of Buddhist philosophy shaping the Malabar’s early history, Karumadikuttan’s dramatic shattered image is a visual shock, a remnant of the challenges of ontological excavation. The surface of coastal materiality is only one order of textuality. The layers beneath are harder to retrieve and disentangle from their seafaring pasts. Epistemological undoing is a constant state of unfolding along the Kottarpuram Waterway, the archipelagic Kerala coastline. Abutting the rocky coastal shores in places and sweeping sandy beaches elsewhere, the non-­human vitality of materiality in all its eroded, discursive aliveness, awakes the sensibilities. The coast is a vibrant space of Indian Ocean ontology.19 Its daily life blurs the scars of oceanic incursions. One drives along bays where Ibn Battuta, Huen Tsiang, Marco Pollo, Ferdinand Magellan, Francisco Almeida, Afonso de Albuquerque, Vasco da Gama, Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Jan Niehaus sailed through. The influence of Ibn Khaldun and Theravada Buddhism is deep rooted along the Malabar seashore.20 Their sea logs sediment the waterfront with reportages that beg a narrative dialectic. Rethinking the mnemonic space of Indian Ocean habitations, of arrivals and leavings, of lives reinvented in the maelstrom of colonialism’s aftershock, is a Deleuzian project in assemblage.21 The ways that communities live along the shore are as varied as the numerous barrier islands and archipelagic floating land masses that constitute the extended coastline across the Malabar from Calicut to Kanyakumari. The imagined lives of communities along this stretch of oceanic formation are largely shaped by the seafaring, networked ontologies of the Eastern and Western Indian Ocean.22 People ruminate, live and work in relation to the Coromandel and Laccadive coasts, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand along the Eastern Indian Ocean routes. Their lives are simultaneously shaped by the Western Indian Ocean legacies of contact and intensified trade of millennia with Madagascar, East Africa and Arabia.23 These linkages generate a syncretism that is deeply interwoven into the landscape of the Malabar, but because of its hybridization, is discretely edited out of India’s current political narratives.24 Rich red soil and white sandy beaches volubly hug the Kerala coast. The serenity belies the violence that shaped the region. The past is just another storm in a part of the world whose ecologies flush out the untethered with the fury of the monsoons. Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine the colonizing forces that impacted lives so deeply that it took generations to recover from the misery of imperialism. But the ruins are visceral and very much there, scattered like permanent hauntings across the environment attenuated toward the Indian Ocean as a somatic space. Here, the sea is not just a resource for food, or a conduit for transportation. It is a tempestuous, soaring deity whose moods and tempers hold the coast in great trembling. The vast undulating Indian Ocean is a place of becoming. All forms of vitality are engaged in this transmutation, either consciously or through the interfacing of materiality with the immanence of the sea. Living along the Indian Ocean forces a vernacular of place-­making that is phenomenological, formed in the wake of a navigational seafaring history of convergences and dispersal.25 The

20   Navigations place-­making process from building to dwelling evokes anima. A vibrancy of variety grips the landscape, forcing an engagement with its forgotten roots, repressed residual memories and tactile ruins.26 Malabar hauntings Under the shadow of the largest fort the Portuguese built in the Malabar, Fort Thangassery, there is a grand old tharravadu (family home), now derelict, ghostlike. It was built on what was possibly the site of a Buddhist temple, which later became Hindu.27 It sits on a hill by the Ashtamudi Lake, surrounded by gentle, rolling hills of coconut trees. It was a place deeply connected to the lake. In 1965, this desolate ruin, what we called the “Valia Veedu” or “big house,” was a lively place, with a large outdoor kitchen bearing six stone fire hearths that burnt coal to prepare food for the large home of nine children and numerous grandchildren—all living in the dispersed family property around the homestead of my mother’s family. Evenings in this provincial hamlet centered around informal gatherings, high teas and large dinners served every day for the random assortment of extended family who might show up. These are sea people with a rich history of a traumatic past that was buried in the silt along the coastline that marked the edge of their property along the Quilon waterfront. Layers of fragmentation and violent discontinuities were invisible to my child’s eye, but like a Chekhov play, as I grew up I slowly grasped what happened. Dying ways of feudal life replete with serfs and a communist ethos had once reshaped the colonial landscape. Now, the subalterns are land-­owning communists who have morphed into unashamedly garrulous bourgeoisie with neon pink and green homes, Kerala style, after stints in Kuwait and Muscat. The once bustling family dwelling is a derelict remnant of the past. The slow decay of my mother’s family home—their atavistic “swamp people” obsessions and their very entrenched preoccupation with coastal life, the sea, mold and the maritime past—fascinated me as the years wore on. But at the source of my deep fascination with the Malabar Coast was a tale divulged to me late one monsoon afternoon while sitting under the swaying palm trees, with the fishy stench of the Ashtamudi Lake wafting up the moldy bank. I was in Quilon on one of my rare visits from New York. My loquacious uncle, a Jesuit priest well trained at the Vatican, felt it opportune before he died to reveal a never discussed family secret. He quietly recounted that there was a family myth that one of my great, great, great grandmothers was a “kept woman” who had been brought on the ships from Indonesia. “Being Catholics, however,” he said, “we don’t discuss such things.” Batavian connections All families have rumors and hearsays. Coastal families along the Malabar Coast have more than their fair share of stories to tell. The family home on top of the hill on Ashtamudi Lake was intriguing for more reasons than the distant past. As a child, I spent holidays in Quilon’s fort city of Thangassery, visiting my

Indian Ocean affect   21 ­ other’s home town from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My Thangy cousins and I m would wander among the sixteenth-­century Portuguese and later the Dutch cemeteries, fascinated by the living ecological remnants of a complex multilayered historical past that shaped the Malabar Coast. Years later, the rumored revelation about a possible Batavian connection led me to the Dutch East India Company’s archives at The Hague. I opened up a hidden history buried inside the fort walls of medieval Quilon.28 I am haunted by this grim scene, which is difficult to visualize: A Dutch ship from Batavia via Aceh, manned by rough seamen, unload an unspeakably distraught group of women, most likely Muslim.29 The Quilon beach at Thangassery is spectacular in vista. Its wide-­open sandy shore a mesmerizing background to the unfolding scene of violence. The fort is unsettling, with its cavernous moat and Portuguese Moorish “cerca mura,” or Moorish encirclement, in reasonable shape despite the centuries. Its forbidding walls continue to keep the tempestuous sea out, along with the wails of the abject women within its fortifications. Every time I walk the old ramparts of the fort city, I am pursued by this elusive, affective visualization. I start to research the mythic reference to my supposed “Indonesian” ancestor. I begin work on the Dutch East India Company’s entrepots. The Dutch East India Company exiled numerous ship loads of populations from Southeast Asia from places as far flung as Tidore, Aceh, Ambon, Ternate, Java, Malacca, Patani, Moluccas and the South African shores, via either Quilon or Galle. Among the Muslim populations from Batavia, in what is now modern Indonesia, political insurgents, anti-­colonial rebels and radical agitators were a documented demographic.30 The sea log of John Nieuhoff, ambassador to Quilon for the Dutch East India Company records that two ships, the Erasmus and the Niewenhoven, arrived in Koulang (Quilon) from Batavia in 1662.31 The minor footnote amidst the detailed documentation of military personnel, spices and commodities, is chilling. The archival fragment from the 1700s makes the present infinitely layered. My jovial uncle the priest was not fabricating. His whispered revelation in the monsoon twilight about the Indonesian grandmother who was a “kept woman” was entirely probable. It dawns on me that the mythical Batavian great great great grandmother would have probably come on one of these two ships through Fort Thangassery as a slave in the seventeenth century. It was the largest harbor in the region, and the main port for Portuguese and Dutch cargoes picking up pepper and spices. The rumor spurs me to study the exposed ramparts of Quilon and its terrifying oublie—the space of shock in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese traces Fort cities repeat their logics. Architectures of fear, they weave a spell upon the city they tower over. Fort Thangassery still stands tall and foreboding. Solid

22   Navigations b­ uttressed military walls of red stone were built by the Portuguese, first in the style of the Castello of Lisbon, then reinforced and built upon by the Dutch during the seventeenth century. A large moat separating the fort from the mainland dominates the once spectacular Quilon fort. Alongside the picturesque homes along the battlements, the regulatory planning of the star-­shaped fort, with its circular pathway up a hill made of heavy stones echoes a similar structure along Lisbon’s medieval Castello. Walking up the Castello, one is reminded of Thangassery. Strolling around the quaint streets of Thangassery, one recalls the uneven cobble stoned streets of Lisbon’s Sao George. My cousins still live inside the now languorous contemporary fort city, but these days its ramparts are occupied with hanging laundry and potted plants. The Quilon region was known for “black gold,” as the coveted spice of black pepper was called in medieval times. The lure of this deceptively petite pod of flavor was such that entire empires colluded and competed with each other, seeking access to its exquisite pungency. Drawn by the aroma of the spices, traders from Aleppo and Zanzibar to Canton sailed the treacherous seas to the Malabar Coast.32 Many stopped at Quilon and never turned back. Others traveled further ashore, embracing new gods. If one was sailing the long stretch from Aceh across the tip of India where the waters are volatile and furious, Quilon would be the first safe harbor to berth at. It offered a safe, ­spacious harbor that topographically mirrored another similar cove around the other major land mass in the Southern Hemisphere, that of the Cape of Good Hope. In scale, strategic accessibility and shelter from the axis of sea currents and oceanic disturbances, these two coves mirrored each other. This geological synchronicity of the two coasts was not missed by the colonizing powers, both the Dutch and the Portuguese, and later the British.33 Hence, the connectivities between Quilon and the southern coast of Africa exceeded the merely tactical replications of colonial administrative practices. Both bays enabled seafaring military powers such as the Dutch and the Portuguese to reproduce habits of colonial recalibration, consolidation and strategic outreach. Johannes Vinckboons It is a beautiful spring day. The Dutch countryside is picture perfect as the train rolls out of Amsterdam toward The Hague. Immaculately tended, the flat rolling landscape of canals, water and farms lull me into a dream space. I feel as though I am inside a Dutch painting. I have embarked on the trip with the elusive goal of finding ship records that track the ships which traveled from the Zuider Zee to Cape Town, and from there across the Cape of Good Hope to the Malabar Coast and onward to Batavia, for nutmeg, cardamom and the Spice Islands. On their return journey, stocked with the wealth of the Indies, the ships would stop at Quilon, and then onward across the Indian Ocean through the Agulhas and Kaap Staad back to the Zuider Zee and Rotterdam.

Indian Ocean affect   23 At the Vereenigde Oost-­Indische Compagnie (VOC) or Dutch East India Company’s archives at The Hague, I am transfixed by their meticulous cataloguing. All commodities including slaves, comfort women and other goods were carefully recorded onto the ship’s sea log. I begin my painstaking search of the VOC’s 8,000 journeys, looking for clues, trying to understand their routes, their preoccupations, their cargoes. Sitting at the computer, I ask the patient archivist how would I track down the possible cargo of women from Batavia to Quilon in the seventeenth century. He replies that I should scour the ship’s logs. I envy the Dutch, their precise archives, their cartographic sweep of the world by the fifteenth century, their grasp of value and mercantilism that so shaped my past as the underside of their future. As if to echo my thoughts, a group of four paintings hang in the colonial room at the Rijksmuseum. They are a series of fort views from the sea, painted by Johannes Vinckboons. The first is of Kaap Staad (Cape Town), the second of Cochin (1663), the third of Pernambuco and the fourth of Batavia.

Visuality, affect, coloniality Standing in the last room of the majestic Rijksmuseum, staring at Johannes Vinckboons’ (also known as Joao Vingboons) rendering of Fort Cochin flanked by the Dutch forts in Africa, Brazil and Batavia, I am overpowered with the realization that I am looking at some of the first cartographic renderings of these spaces. Looking at the beautiful maps in ochre, mustards and faded Malabar reds, one is drawn into the terrifying seduction of the colonial fantasy. The scenes stage the seizure of ways of knowing. For a formerly colonized subject, this is the moment of unbecoming. Anger commingled with awe transforms into Sudhir Kakar’s notion of the connective imaginary.34 This is the process of translating the decolonial visual transaction out of the personal and into an epistemological shock. Titled The Vingboons Atlas, Vinckboons’ richly hued collection includes over 600 maps that he painted for the Dutch East India Company. The atlas presents the scope of Kakar’s connective imaginary; it is a cartography of decoloniality in process. Frozen images of captured cities precisely painted to surveyor specs produces enduring records of a landscape of what Amitav Ghosh calls “ecological derangement.” A view of Batavia from the ocean, painted with incredible detail in the seventeenth century, shows a string of islands which had strategic interest to the Dutch. A detailed map of the notoriously evil Elmina Castle, painted in hues of greens and browns, captures a scenically impressive view of rolling hills and a large fortress along a splendid coast.35 If one did not know what the map represented—the most heinous of human constructions—it would pass for a lovely tourist destination. A vivacious map of Cape Verde, with the view from the ocean looking inland. A detailed map of the elaborate fort town of Calicut communicates the strategic importance of the site to the cartographer. These are only some of the nearly 600 maps that Johannes Vinckboons meticulously painted; maps that reveal with great precision the scale of streets to

24   Navigations the fort, and the environs of the colonial ports to the uncharted territories lying outside the Dutch borders. Vinckboons’ maps are remarkably detailed, visually suggestive renderings of entire urban life-­worlds along the global trading routes of the Dutch Golden period. Each of the illustrations is executed with the intuitive eye of the cartographer, who invents a fictive world view made real through the production of maps. Centuries later, it is through Vinckboons’ early illustrations that we have the first visual depictions of Manhattan under the Dutch, as well as those of Quilon, Calicut, Cochin and Cananor during the Dutch period. We also have illustrations of other international ports of call from the medieval era, including Aceh, Macao, Kaap Staad, Recife, Sao Tome, Panaji, Galle, the Maldives and Colombo, to name a few from the global South. For the contemporary urbanist, revisiting these colonial renderings against their vital landscapes is a practice in decolonizing the city, and reinterpreting its future. Vinckboons’ maps are imagistic depictions of invented ontologies. Somewhere in those waterlogged hues lie traces of Indian Ocean becoming, and of the interconnectivity that shaped my future. I stare at the raw projections in greens, browns and blues as though they might reveal a murmur, or even a sigh, of disembodied knowing. Ghosts of the Dutch It is another rainy day on Singel Street. I ride my bicycle down the thirteenth-­ century part of Amsterdam and en route, I run into a picturesque map shop. A storybook map-­maker’s dream world, the compact store reveals a bespectacled man buried behind a pile of maps. A step away from the busy pedestrian activity of the tiny street, Mr. D’s shop is a flashback into the historic past of the Brabant region and the Netherlands. I wander amidst the antiquarian maps and uncertainly ask if he has any maps of the Dutch colonial era, particularly of the Dutch East India Company’s holdings in Asia. Mr. D looks up with sudden interest and asks what exactly I am looking for. I ask for Johannes Vinckboons’ maps. I tell him I am following a family rumor of a great great great grandmother who was brought by the Dutch from Batavia to Quilon. The story captures Mr. D’s interest and he steps away from his desk at the back of the packed store of maps from every corner of Europe. He approaches me and says he might have a few. Then he says, he too has a tale to share: his ancestor from the 1700s was a VOC captain who traveled from Texel on the Zuider Zee through Cape Town and Cochin to Hooghly, where he eventually climbed the ranks of administrative office to head the VOC at Hooghly. Mr. D spoke of how the old money of modern Amsterdam was really the new money of the 1700s, accrued from the colonial trading ports in Asia and Africa. They were the new money of the time. Today, the handful of Dutch families of old wealth remain the descendants of the Dutch Burghers whose vast wealth was acquired across different parts of the Southern colonies in Asia, Africa and Brazil. Mr. D looks me in the eye and says: “May, I am sorry we Dutch did this to your ancestor. How terrible the story. I feel perhaps maybe we are even related.”

Indian Ocean affect   25 Then, disappearing momentarily into the recesses of his store, Mr. D. returns with a map of thirteenth-­century Amsterdam and gives it to me as a gift of a shared history, of a mea culpa across time, a potlatch of reconciliation. I am disarmed by the gesture. Mr. D’s ancestor of the same name buried three wives in India. He lived in Hooghly for thirty years, finally returning to the Zuider Zee to live the rest of his life back in the cold Northern Sea. A painting commissioned by the VOC commemorating the elder Mr. D’s sea journey back to Texel through the Bay of Bengal still hangs in Mr. D’s home. Dwelling in the former Dutch New Amsterdam, now New York, the simultaneity of urban geography, and the overlapping histories of conquest and colonial incursion embossed on both the colonizer and colonized, introduces a strange synchronicity of the contemporary urban experience. As I began living in downtown Manhattan, the connectivities between the Dutch East India Company’s Western possessions, of which their small beaver-­populated outpost New Amsterdam was one, and the town my parents lived in, Cochin, Kerala, began to disentangle. Both were created during the same period in the seventeenth century by the Dutch as colonial ports. Walking along the Belgian ballast stone streets of downtown Manhattan near the early Stadt Huys of Dutch New York, I had always wondered why I experienced a mnemonic memory of Fort Cochin’s streets. It took more walking to realize the two cities shared a legacy of Dutch urban geography: dikes and techniques of water management; a visual history of views from the sea, which remain the earliest depictions of both New York’s and Cochin’s skyline from the water. This sensation of material affect, of disparate and far-­flung relationalities is what Timothy Morton identifies as “the mesh of ecological thought.”36 This mesh of sensations is a distinctively Indian Ocean affect, one evocative of colonial ports of the global South whose maritime facades still maintain an urban reference to their trans-­oceanic historicities. Small, winding cobblestone streets abut colonial New York’s moldy seaport with its Caribbean and Indian Ocean seafaring connections, most significantly embodied by the New York pirate Captain William Kidd. The immigrant Scotsman lived on Hanover Square in Manhattan. He had apparently bankrolled the steeple for the first iteration of Trinity Church on Wall Street in the seventeenth century, and was a well regarded, civic minded citizen of colonial New York. Kidd was hired by British Merchants in New York to protect their shipping interests in the Indian Ocean against pirates, and the French. While being stationed in Madagascar, Kidd used Cochin, India as a base for his Eastern Indian Ocean movements. The lore of Captain Kidd on both the Manhattan and the Cochin side of the oceanic imaginary brought new threads of meaning to the fore. Kidd was my link to what appeared to be a forgotten history between New York and the Indian Ocean. As an oceanic ontology, the Indian Ocean is very much connected to New York as a maritime city. At the height of Dutch colonization, New York had more in common with the VOC’s large inventories of Asian and African colonial ports than it did with the distinctly land-­bound histories of America’s other towns. New York’s mercantilism, like Cochin’s mercantilism, is a residue

26   Navigations of its Dutch trading ethos. At once forgotten in time, yet repeated through urban ways of adapting space, both these landscapes are connected to the Indian Ocean through the Atlantic, with roots in Cape Town. These cities share a palimpsest of urban memories that are simultaneously present and reminiscent of the past. They are a postcolonial syncing of urban knowledges through the quotidian details of everyday life. Now as more postcolonials traverse the ghostly sites of their past, unmention­ able memories spill forth. Unforgivable acts are revisited. A surreal, shocking visual landscape of disappeared moments begin to unhinge the archives at The Hague and the Torre do Tombo. Instead of a repository of mere numbers, bodies, ports of call and entire lives of sea histories begin to take spectral shape. At Cochin, this is often reduced to the number of ears and limbs the Portuguese dismembered, the number of Asian slaves the Dutch shipped to Batavia and the mestizo children they orphaned on Cochin’s Vypin Island. In Lisbon, this decussation is an elegant decay of a former glory built on pillage and plunder. In Amsterdam, a Calvinist history of stock-­taking was a modern global business whose darker side resides at the Troppenmuseum and the Scheepvaartmuseum. Here, proudly exhibited, is a rational view of the violent culture of shock and awe that normalized the Renaissance world of colonial expansionism and pillage.

Notes   1 May Joseph, Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).   2 Henrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism” in Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).   3 Sanjay Subramaniam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).   4 David Ludden, “Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to Historicize the Rohingya Crisis.” Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture, April 9, 2018, New York University.   5 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory Culture Society 7 (1990): 295, 302.   6 Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1989). Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Saidiya Hartman, Lose My Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007).   7 Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).   8 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).   9 Gilles Deleuze, “Liquid Perception” in Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 10 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory Culture Society 7 (1990): 295, 302. 11 Sudhir Kakar, Mad and Divine (New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2008). 12 Fred Moten, in the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 259.

Indian Ocean affect   27 13 Padmanabha Menon, History of Kerala, Written in the Form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar Vol. 1–4, ed. T.K. Krishna Menon (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2001). 14 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 15 Ritty A. Lukose, Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 16 Tome Pires, Suma Oriental of Tome Pires: An Account of the East, From the Red Sea To China, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, ed. Armando Cortesao (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005). 17 Aruna Deshpande, Buddhist India Recovered (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2013), 207–208. Laskshmi Subramaniam, Medieval Seafarers (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1999), 47. 18 Deshpande, Buddhist India Recovered, 207–208. 19 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matters: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Bennet’s notion of a non-­human vibrancy opens up the indeterminacy of oceanic ontologies to a discursive realm that was unavailable before. 20 Deshpande, Buddhist India Recovered, 207–208. 21 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus (London: The Athlone Press, 1988). 22 Sanjeev Sanyal, The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History (New Delhi: Viking, 2016). 23 M.O. Koshy, The Dutch Power in Kerala (1729–1758) (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989). 24 David Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 25 Laskshmi Subramaniam, Medieval, 47. 26 Bennet, Vibrant Matters. 27 Aruna Deshpande, Buddhist India Recovered. Deshpande documents that Quilon was a prominent seat of Buddhism in Kerala during the first millenia. I find Deshpande’s research sheds light on family rumors regarding the genealogy of the sacred space that had housed a Hindu temple, rumored to have been Buddhist, that later became the family home of my Catholic mother in Quilon in the early 1900s. 28 John Nieuhoff, Voyages and Travels into Brazil and the East Indies (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2003), 231. 29 Francis R. Bradley, Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da’ud bin ‘Abd Allah al-­Fatani in Mecca and South East Asia (Honalulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016). 30 Bradley, Forging Islamic Power. 31 Nieuhoff, Voyages, 231. 32 M.O. Koshy, “The Dutch Trade in Kerala” in The Dutch Power in Kerala, 179. Keki N. Daruwalla, For Pepper and Christ (New Delhi: Penguin Press, 2009). 33 Nieuhoff, Voyages. 34 Sudhir Kakar, “Afterword: Spirit and Psyche” in Mad and the Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (New Delhi: Viking, 2008). 35 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006). 36 Timothy Morton, Ecological Thought (Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

28   Navigations

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory Culture Society, 1990. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matters: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bradley, Francis R. Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Daud Bin Abd Allah Al-­Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. Broeze, Frank. Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries. Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. “Liquid Perception.” In Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Thousand Plateaus. London: The Athlone Press, 1988. Deshpande, Aruna. Buddhist India Recovered. Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2013. Dussel, Henrique. Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism. Nepantla: Views from South 1.3. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose My Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007. Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Joseph, May. Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Kakar, Sudhir. “Afterword: Spirit and Psyche.” In Mad and the Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. New Delhi: Viking, 2008. Kakar, Sudhir. Mad and Divine. New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2008. Koshy, M.O. The Dutch Power in Kerala (1729–1758). New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989. Ludden, David. “Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to historicize the Rohingya Crisis.” Lecture at Carol Breckenridge Memorial, New York University. April 9, 2018. Ludden, David. Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Lukose, Ritty A. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Menon, Padmanabha. History of Kerala: A History of Kerala Written in the Form of Notes on Visschers Letters from Malabar, edited by T.K. Krishna Menon. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2001. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Nandy, Ashis. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nandy, Ashis. The Savage Freud: And Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Nieuhoff, John. Voyages and Travels into Brazil and the East Indies. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2003. Pires, Tome. The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires An Account of the East, From The Red Sea To China. Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, edited by Armando Cortesao. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005.

Indian Ocean affect   29 Sanyal, Sanjeev. The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History. New Delhi: Viking, 2016. Sheriff, Abdul. Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Subramaniam, Laskshmi. Medieval Seafarers. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1999. Subramaniam, Sanjay. The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

2 Sea of shock

Male, Maldives, 2015. Lapis lazuli blue, Prussian blue, sapphire blue, black blue. I circumnavigate the flat island of Male in a long walk in search of seawalls. Placid and vast, the surreal azure oceanscape is engulfing. I am the only one walking the island’s circumference at midday, and the only woman. Here I claim my Malabari-­ness, which opens up a geographic intimacy that surprises me every time. Conversations on why people have come so far, what coastal life is like in tiny Male. Workers here come from all over the oceanic diaspora, the Sunderbans of Bangladesh, Andaman Islands, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Kerala coast. Coming from the island of Manhattan, with its vertiginous heights and industrialized coastline, I study the lusterless cement corniche of Male laid bare to the elements. I find myself getting agoraphobic. Too much open space. Sunlight soaks my mind. Low-­lying structures with nowhere to hide. There is no vegetation or foliage to arrest the flow of water. There are no seawalls other than the one for the President, courtesy of the Japanese, and the other for the Imam. I know the last storms have contaminated the aquafirs, increasing the salinity of the watertable. I ask a group of fashionable young women accountants sunbathing in their elegantly attired burkhas about their thoughts on their flat archipelago. They shrug in resignment, terrified to speak about the water, the sun or themselves. By the fifth day in Male, I begin to get afraid too. Asking too many questions. I begin to block my door with a chair. At the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice hangs a mesmerizing Renaissance map illustrated by the Camaldolese monk, Fra Mauro. The path-­breaking Mappamundi painstakingly illustrates the island of Murano in the fifteenth century. Awash in cerulean blues, turquoises and ochres, the 2 × 2 m cartographic feast depicts the world inverted, with the global South at the top. The Maldive Islands are at visual north; Quilon and the Malabar Coast are prominently positioned just beneath the spinal archipelago. The world is all sea; Europe is in the south. On a cartouche in the southeast corner, close to the edge of the map, the monk has inscribed a sentient fact: the Malabar region was prominent in medieval Arab and Venetian imaginations. Isola Colombo, (as Quilon was known to Mauro) which has abundance of gold and much merchandise, and produces pepper in quantity.… The

Sea of shock   31 people of this island are of diverse faiths, Jews, Mahomedans and idolaters …1 Fra Mauro’s Mappamundi frames the world anew for the contemporary viewer, influenced by the Arab cartographer Al-­Idrissi.2 The Sea of India opens to the oceans for the first time in Western cartography, where formerly it was depicted as land locked. Quilon, the largest port in South Asia at the time, is depicted as an island. The Indian Ocean islands of Andaman, Nicobar, Maldives and Ceylon are prominently demarcated for the premier time in mapping history. The Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Chinese and Venetians had traded with the Malabar region from as early as the first century ad, as evidenced in the archaeological remains of the pre-­Christian region of Muziris along the Malabar Coast.3 Earlier migrations of Jews fleeing the destruction of the Second Temple had already established an ancient colony at Pattanam in ancient Muziris (now the coastline near the Periyar River, in modern Kerala). Judaism had arrived before the birth of Christ, and Buddhism had arrived by the third century bc; Christianity appeared in the Malabar by the first century ad, Islam had arrived by the seventh and African belief systems were present by the fifteenth century.4 By the time Fra Mauro had painted his Mappamundi, the world had already been treacherously navigated and cosmopolitanly settled along the Malabar Coast for over a millennium. Consequently, nomadic relationships to places has always been an aspect of Indian Ocean coastal societies. The sea was an unpredictable harbinger of new futures. Mapping trade routes from the Roman period onto the migrant practices of twenty-­first-century circuits is an exercise in memory and chorography. Contemporary spaces reinscribe older journeys, throwing fresh twists onto forgotten routes. Reimagining ancient and medieval trading logics through modern technological means offers fresh insights into a now defunct seafaring past. Layers of place-­ making unravel through a merging of the historical ruin and the migratory present.

I Contantinople to Cranganore Inter-­oceanic journeys dramatically influenced notions of the new. One trajectory of modern shock lies in a sensibility borne of the sea. Sites of former colonial pillage embody the visceral signs of modernity, residues of travels across oceans.5 This thread of traversal across the expansive seas has been lost to the dweller of the twenty-­first century whose sense of speed quickly spun beyond what any earlier sea traveler could have imagined. Still, the throes of wonder and surprise, of adventure and curiosity, of power and knowledge, lie entrenched in an earlier history of arrival, of discovery, of disruption, now fast disappearing. The material remnants of historic shock are strewn across the coastlines of continents, relegated to forgotten national heritage sites and ruins of the past, as in the ancient sea walls of Constantinople straddling the Bosphorus, now modern Istanbul. These shards of shock offer insights into the process of modernity as it erodes alongside its oceanic history.

32   Navigations Standing atop the Theodosian Walls of ancient Constantinople, now Istanbul, with the Dardanelles sprawling across the horizon from the Bosphorus through the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean, one is confronted with the utterly riveting sight of the shock of modernity. Marked by the awe-­inspiring skyline of Sinan the Magnificent, this fifth-­century ad capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, atop the Ottoman city of the Selçuk Turks, is now superseded by the contemporary sprawl of metropolitan Istanbul. This layered visuality is the perfect merging of orbis terrarum and profundis maris, of Europe, Asia and Africa—from Carthage to Rome and Constantinople. Here at the center of the Ancient world, along the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, India, China and Europe meet Africa in a merging of the seas, of the trade winds and river flows. Along the Bosphorus, one begins to understand how small the world must have seemed at the center of the maritime economy. But along the peripheries of the Malabar—the East African coast, the Malaccan Straits and the South China Seas—the world stretches out interminably as if it is remotely and languorously gripped in a violent pact of colonial oppression, and yet it is aslumber in its isolated sense of possibility, and of perspective on selfhood.6 Dazzled by the splendor of Constantinople’s contours and its sweep of the Mediterranean maritime world under the Roman and Ottoman period that impacted the Kerala coast, I imagine an even earlier moment of shock that transformed the Malabar Coast. The Malabar Coast is a region that spans coastal Kerala from the north to the south. This ancient coastline is filled with the residual traces of maritime trade routes from antiquity. At the mouth of the great Periyar River where it opens out to sea, there is a luscious, curvaceous loop of river and ocean. The site is transfixing in its sweeping vistas. The majestic green river winds its way in both directions toward the receding horizon of verdant forests. At this strategic point, eras, cultures and histories collide. The junction of ancient Syrian Christianity, Second Temple Jewish migration, African spirit worship, Dutch and Portuguese fort architecture, and ancient Buddhist sacred sites transformed into the first Muslim mosque of India, as well as a Tantric temple. This region, known to Ptolemy as Muziris, is located north of the city of Cochin. It is an extraordinary constellation of ancient cosmopolitanism.7 Ancient Muziris, whose main town, Kodungallur (colonial Cranganore) is located on the shores of the Periyar River, is an enigmatic source of multiple histories. At Kodungallur, Roman coins from the first century ad, along with ancient pottery, suggest a trading relationship with the Phoenicians, Romans and the Syrians. Later, the Christians of the first century, followed by the flows of Islam in the seventh century, created a cosmopolitan ethos of coexistence and adaptability that still permeates the region today. However, in 2010, Kodungallur is a sleepy town forgotten by all but the historian of antiquity. I marvel that no one in Cochin has heard of this fascinating town that embodied a New York syncretism 2,000 years before the very idea of New York. Furthermore, no one in Cochin had a clue how to get there. After much driving around, I began to locate different sites that constitute the extended region of ancient Muziris,

Sea of shock   33 including the cosmopolitan village of antiquity, Chendamangalam, home to the earliest known Synagogue in India, of Second Temple lineage. Kodungallur’s modern sensibility of mutual coexistence is bolstered by the moderating presence of the seventh-­century Cheraman Juma Masjid built by Malik Ibn Dinar, a seafarer from Oman in ad 629, who also became the mosque’s first Ghazi. The Cheraman Juma Masjid is the only mosque in the world with a Hindu name. The Custodian of the mosque, Mr. Faizal Edavanakad, proudly points out this distinction to me as a sign of the mosque’s ecumenical and secular commitments. Faizal emphasizes that unlike many mosques around the world, non-­Muslims are welcome at this mosque.8 The Masjid is a modest structure alongside a busy main street. I cover my head and I walk into the sacred place; I wash my feet and enter the women’s section, which faces the sanctum sanctorum of the original seventh-­century structure. One is hard pressed to imagine that this humble structure has the distinction of being the first mosque in India, but in fact, the Masjid asserts it is the earliest site of Islam in India. According to Mr. Sharaf, the scholarly curator of the Cheraman Juma Masjid museum, what is remarkable about the evolution of the mosque is how the Cheraman Juma Masjid community has self-­consciously promoted an inclusive, non-­judgmental public ethos in a predominantly Hindu region. Mr. Sharaf proudly speaks about how the trustees of the Mosque have foregrounded its presence as an enduring symbol of cosmopolitanism through centuries of theological differences, ideological shifts and violent histories of colonial expansionism. The soft-­spoken Mr. Sharaf ’s narration is a story of reclamation that combines archaeological research, local myth, seafaring history and historic archives. Sharaf emphasizes how the Muslim community of the ancient Muziris region carefully cultivated a mutually tolerant policy of coexistence that it proudly guards to this day. What is even more intriguing is that the foundation of the mosque was built upon the structural bones of an old Buddhist vihara, or temple. Another epistemological shock.9

Ii Cabo de Tormentoso True Civilizations are poetic shocks: the shock of the stars, of the sun, the plant, the animal, the shock of the round globe, of the rain, of the light, of numbers, the shock of life, the shock of death. /  Since the sun temple, since the mask, since the Indian, since the African man, too much distance has been calculated here, has been granted here, between things and ourselves.10 Shock is the shaping aesthetic of the Malabar region. From locale to locale the sites of passage, of colonial violence and epistemological shifts mark the landscape. One significant impact of shock is the public disappearance of Buddhism in a region that was historically Buddhist in the centuries preceding the arrival of St. Thomas to Kodungallur in ad 69. The systemic erasure of Buddhism as a

34   Navigations visual marker and social practice along the Malabar Coast is an impact of shock that still ruptures the region’s way of life through the buried remnants of Buddhist material culture. Temples along the coast, older family homes, now Hindu or Christian in identification, were Buddhist two millennia ago. The consequences of shock over the long duree in the context of the Malabar region is a story of ocean currents, waves of conquest, historic rewriting and the edited history of the present. In Europe, shock is the dramatic commutation between the East and West. At the tip of India, spanning the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts, it is a perpetual and continuous process of impact, erosion, assimilation, transformation and mutation. It is neither a definable moment, nor discernible region; rather, it is a complex of aquapelagic transmissions between traders, seafarers, conquistadors, pilgrims, devotees and refugees.11 Consider the proximity between the Malabar region, Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands, and their widely disparate post-­independence cultures: the cosmopolitan one on the Kerala coast, the predominantly Buddhist one in Sri Lanka and the singularly Muslim one across the Maldives. However, in the first century ad, all three coastal regions were predominately Buddhist. Trade between the Malabar Coast and the Maldives influenced Maldivian commerce and aesthetics. By the fourth century ad, Buddhism spread along the maritime routes from South Asia to Southeast Asia and China. This connection is particularly visual in southern Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam (formerly the Champa region) as well as north of Hanoi, all the way up into China.12 There is the influence of South Indian temple architecture in the Cham region; Buddhist iconography all along the Malacca Straits and the South China Seas attests to a transformation through peaceful trade between Arabs, Venetians, Asians and Africans preceding the later centuries of conquest. The syncretic molding of the Malabar Coast through commerce and seafaring communications is well under way before Europeans land in Calicut with the intention of colonizing and enslaving populations. Against this backdrop of multiple trading economies between Constantinople, Aleppo, Quilon and China, another scene of shock unfolds 800 years later. This time it is a geographically remote landscape of cliffs and dramatic promontories— another evocative staging of trans-­oceanic mastery as Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope. Five centuries later, traveling south of Cape Town, South Africa, along the Atlantic coast by car, one is held transfixed by the expanse of stormy sea that batters the tapering land mass at the end of the African continent. Veering high along the narrowing ridge, the tip of Africa meanders in the distance toward its physical convergence at Cape Point, a little south of the serene and breathtakingly dramatic Cape of Good Hope. The geographic tail end of the continent separating the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic Ocean lies further around the promontory of cliffs and dramatic beaches at Agulhas, the geographic southern tip of the African land mass on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. Cape Point in South Africa is a symbolic reminder of the volatile transformations of the last six centuries. Standing at the delirious tip, high up along the cliffs of the psychologically southernmost part of Africa, the frothing, churning

Sea of shock   35 colliding oceans where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean, marks the foaming conflicts of modernity’s formations. A clear effervescent white line of cresting foam extends diagonally across the ocean stretching geographically southward, away from the viewer and toward the horizon. Cape Point marks the medieval history of fifteenth-­century trade routes mapped onto the migrant practices of twenty-­first-century travel patterns. The craggy rocks against the violent ocean below exudes a forbidding reminder of the many crossings—African, Dutch, Arab, Malay, Portuguese, Indian, British—that painfully transformed the African coast into modernity’s visage. At Cape Point, imperialism and decolonization is simultaneously invoked. It embodies the terrifying moment of Bartolomeu Dias’s arrival at the site and his failed attempts to reach India. Cape Point also marks the pivotal journey of Vasco da Gama, rounding the Cape following Dias, but succeeding in making landfall in India on the Malabar Coast. The historical past and migratory present converge here. The senses retrace older trading logics through modern technological means to produce new cultural relationships to a now defunct yet formative history. Retracing the pathways of sixteenth-­century shock today is an exercise in memory and ruination. Here, nomadic relationships to placeness is epitomized. It is all movement, waves, wind, ships and flows of people—the forces of change. Cabo de Tormentoso, later Cape of Good Hope, is a mythic, elemental place of my Tanzanian childhood, where I had been told modernity’s shock reverberates, collides, converges and transforms into something new. It is a place of colonial violence, but also of great calm and intensity. At this place where two oceans meet, everything changed. At this place, even the sea churns a frothing divide separating two oceans of different sea hues and colliding temperatures— one cold, the other warm. The merging oceans generate inverting currents. Those treacherous currents capture turns of history and memory. They toss up cultural obsessions born out of colonial violence—that moment in time when everything altered for people living at the tip of Africa and at the tip of India along the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama first landed. Cabo de Tormentoso, the Cape of Storms, was a place of dreams for the Portuguese and later for the Dutch. It was to become a pillaged landscape of traumatic hauntings for Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Iii Spirits of the Tana Baru The delirious feeling of standing at a nerve point of the world’s greatest involuntarily nomadic journey, the slave trade routes, is concretized high up on a hill in the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town. Amidst grass, shrubs and dry brush, lies an ancient cemetery. The grassy knoll, poised on a hill overlooking the Cape Town waterfront, exudes an otherworldly ambience. Despite its centrality within the city, it is deserted and remote. Here above the city, spirits lie in respite, tended by the faithful. The spirit of the Tana Baru is at once of the past and the present. The Tana Baru are a group of holy men or saints of Cape Town’s seventeenth-­ century Muslim community. Their resting place up on the hill is both poignant

36   Navigations and disruptive—reminding one of journeys through which human cargoes were transported, from Batavia to Cape Town, via the Maldives and Cochin, and onward to Pernambuco. These journeys are now remote and forgotten. But the serenity of the Tana Baru draws the past into a retracing of the present. When? How? Words rise. But for the living around the cemetery, the Cape Malay community, the quiet resting place is a thing of the past, along with the forbidding of Islam and the recitation of the Qur’an. The tombs of the Tana Baru remind me of the slave ships carrying their Malay cargo from Batavia all the way to Cape Town. These early Muslims were forbidden to carry their Qur’ans with them. They were denied the holy book. The first Qur’ans in Cape Town were recited from memory. Some of the first Imams were imprisoned on Robben Island; they were left to die and left behind the first Kramats of Cape Town. The Tana Baru evoke the many spaces of the nomadic dead of Cape Town. The Kramats, memorials of holy men from the Cape Malay community, mark this history of migration, forgetting, and a diasporic sacred tradition forged out of exile and death. Their burial sites remain a testament to earlier migrations to Cape Town. Around the Cape of Good Hope lies the crossroads of the world. Bartolomeu Dias and Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama and Ibn Battuta, Africans, Arabs and Indians. But it is Fernando Pessoa who draws this seafaring world into a singular vision. Pessoa’s journey from Cape Town through East Africa, linking Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar and Lisbon, shrinks the great distances of time and space into the stance of the poet, standing at his bureau, writing of what he saw and lost. The oceans swell in Pessoa’s writings, spilling beyond the Tagus River into the many oceans that lie between Lisbon and Cape Town. Pessoa’s imagery traverses the western coast of Africa southward and travels up the Eastern seaboard through Zanzibar and Mombasa. In the poem, “The Stone Pillar,” Pessoa chronicles the ominous navigational pillar of Bartolomeu Dias that marks the southern African Landscape at the western tip of the Cape of Good Hope, a journey of derailments that led to the accidental discovery of rounding the Cape. Pessoa invokes the Portuguese Sea, “Mar Portuguese,” as a sea of reinventions, where lives and maps collided: O salty sea, so much of whose salt /  Is Portugal’s tears! /  … Whoever would go beyond the Cape /  Must go beyond sorrow.13 A brutal empire of the seas gushes through Pessoa’s poetry, shaping the new colonial ideology of becoming. Again, Pessoa: … I, Diogo Cao, a navigator, / 

Sea of shock   37 Left this pillar by the swarthy strand /  And sailed onward. /  … This pillar is a sign to the wind and skies /  … The limitless sea is Portuguese.14 Pessoa’s writings chronicle the history of modern shock from a particular trajectory. One cannot embrace the aesthetics of the historic avant-­garde without coming to terms with the history of shock that shaped it. Traversing the history of shock leads me to Lisbon, where the historic connections between the Portuguese colonization of Africa and India lie nestled along the Avenue das India and the Casas da India. A walk through the city of Lisbon is a journey into autoethnography.15 Lisbon puts images and feelings, along with the notes of expeditioners and navigators, back into the archives of colonial administrators. It also disinters repressed sensations of recognition for the formerly colonized. Lisbon’s golden streets permeate with the affective hidden lives of the colonies. India, Africa, Macao and the Malabar hover along its elegant streets. The grandeur of Lisbon’s avenues and buildings contrast with the decrepitude of the decaying city. An ochre patina fills the city’s hues alongside the red tiled city. A warehouse reminds me of the tea factories of Cochin’s Mattanchery Island. The scale of the Castello of Lisbon reminds me of Fort Aguado in Panjim, Goa, and of Fort Thangassery in Quilon where my mother comes from. Lisbon is a dreamscape of the past. Walking at twilight along the ramparts of the old Castello high up where the fort still remains is a stroll in cultural shock. Again, moments of recognition. A curve in the stone wall brings me to a scene that reminds me of Bagamoyo, the old slave port of East Africa. The view of Lisbon from the sea is the unforgettable juncture of the Tagus River and Atlantic Ocean, where a city on the hill rises strategically, with a sweeping view of the sea. I am startled by the visual repetition of the image: Fort Jesus at Mombasa, at the junction of Tudor Creek and the India Ocean. Fort Cranganore (Kodungallur) along the River Periyar, at the opening to the Indian Ocean. Fort Aguado at the juncture of the Mandovi River and the Arabian Sea. At Galle, Ceylon, the spectacular junction of ocean and promontory. In Portuguese Sea, Fernando Pessoa writes of Mar Portugues, that vast oceanic imaginary that evokes Portuguese mastery of the sea by the sixteenth century. This imperialistic visual, at once heroic and nationalistic for Portuguese, is simultaneously a terrifying sea for Africa and Asia. At Bagamoyo, this Portuguese Sea is a zone of irreparable loss and horrific crossings. At Lisbon, the Portuguese Sea is a faded glory. At Belem, the Portuguese Sea is an expansionist’s dream. It is where da Gama leaves for the Indies and where Bartolomeu Dias leaves in search of a sea route to India. Washed away by centuries, Mar Portugues is, for our time, the great sea of misery for those outside Europe’s optics. It

38   Navigations is that moment of unknowing but seeking, of curiosity left un-­answered by distance and the limits of the visual. That moment in the mid-­1400s, where the scale of imagination was open ended, un-­chartered, megalomaniacal, hallucinatory— this is what Mar Portugues invokes. Now, standing at Cape Point in 2015, Mar Portuguese liquefies into the ghosts of the sea. It is a moment of unthinking mastery, as Julietta Singh puts it.16 The ocean of shock is a fluid archive whose watery past bears secrets best left at the bottom of the sea. Yet, the past tugs at the present. A call for accounting. Of rewriting. Of reparations. Of reiterations. What Tina Campt calls the practice of refusals, of fugitivity, of futurity.17

Notes   1 Fra Mauro, Mappamundi 1457–1459. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.   2 S. Maqbul Ahmad, “Cartography of al-­Sharif al-­Idrisi” in The History of Cartography. Vol. 2, Book 1, eds. J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).   3 George Menachery and Werner Chakkalakkal, Kodungallur: The Cradle of Christianity in India (Thrissur: Marthoma Pontifical Shrine, 2000). Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India (London: Penguin Books, 2002).   4 K.S. Mathew, “Introduction” in The Portuguese and the Socio-­Cultural Changes in India, 1500–1800, eds. K.S. Mathew and Teotonio R. de Souza, Pius Malekandathil (Tellicherry: MESHAR, 2001). Shanti Sadiq Ali, The African Dispersal In the Deccan: From Medieval to Modern Times (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Limited, 1995). N.S. Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003). Susan Vishwanathan, The Christians of Kerala (New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1994).   5 Recent Humanities scholarship excavating a decolonial sensibility of the sea includes the work of Christina Sharpe, Engseng Ho, Saidiya Hartman, Macarena Gomez-­Barris (with accent), Gina Ulysse, Nicole Starosielski, Francois Verges (Accent), Francois Lionnet, Marlene NourbeSe Phillip, Yvette Christianse (with umlaut) and Fred Moten.   6 K.S. Mathew, ed., Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). Ashin Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).   7 George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951).   8 Interview with Faisal Edavanakad, Administrator of Cheraman Juma Masjid, July 2015.   9 Varghese K. George, “A Mosque Visit Modi Finds Hard to Pull Off ” in The Hindu, August 27, 2015. 10 Aimé Césaire, “Tropiques: Undermining Vichy in Martinique” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, eds. and trans. by Michael Richardson-­ Krzystof Fijalkowski (London: Verso, 1996), 119. 11 Phillip Hayward, “Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6:16 (1) (2012): 1–10. 12 Haraprasad Ray, “An Enquiry into the Presence of the Chinese in South and Southeast Asia after the Voyages of Zheng He in Early Fifteenth Century” in Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K.S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1995). Also see Deng Kaisong, “Dispute for Macao Trade between European Powers from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century” in ed. K.S. Mathew, Mariners, Merchants and Oceans. 13 “Portuguese Sea” in Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, ed. and trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998).

Sea of shock   39 14 “Stone Pillar” in Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, ed. and trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998). 15 Patricia Clough, “Ontological Perspective of Knowledge Objects” in Auto Affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 16 Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 17 Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Bibliography Ahmad, S. Maqbul. “Cartography of al-­Sharif al-­Idrisi” in The History of Cartography, edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward. Vol. 2, Book 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Césaire, Aimé. “Tropiques: Undermining Vichy in Martinique.” In Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, edited and translated by Michael Richardson-­ Krzystof Fijalkowski. London: Verso, 1996. Clough, Patricia. “Ontological Perspective of Knowledge Objects.” In Auto Affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. George, Varghese K. “A Mosque Visit Modi Finds Hard to Pull Off. ” The Hindu, August 27, 2015. Hayward, Phillip. “Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6:16 (1) (2012): 1–10. Kaisong, Deng. “Dispute for Macao Trade between European Powers from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century.” In Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, edited by K.S. Mathew. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1995. Mauro, Fra. Mappamundi 1457–1459. Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Menachery, George and Werner, Chakkalakkal. Kodungallur: The Cradle of Christianity in India. Thrissur: Marthoma Pontifical Shrine, 2000. Pessoa, Fernando. Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, edited and translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Ray, Haraprasad. “An Enquiry into the Presence of the Chinese in South and Southeast Asia after the Voyages of Zheng He in Early Fifteenth Century.” In Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, edited by K.S. Mathew. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1995. Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Thapar, Romila. The Penguin History of Early India. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

3 Ocean ontologies

Quilon, India, 1965. Cradling my new born brother, mother and I wait for the canoe at the edge of Ashtamudi Lake, Quilon, to row us to church across the  expansive body of water. Water hyacinths and speckled green foliage hug the red mud shoreline. I look across the eight-­fingered lake, always mesmerized by its verdant, dawn serenity. The oarsman’s eyes are shot red. His boat rickety with use. People pile on over capacity. Starchy white mundus and colorful saris. I can see the lapping water between the large gaps under my feet. Perched on one of the narrow wooden planks, I am lulled by the rhythmic sound of the oars. Suddenly, the boat tips, and the baby falls into the lake. Nobody knows how to swim but the ferryman! Seeing the Sea. The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-­old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents … this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life.1 Oceans are material sites filled with anima. Currents, waves, tides, wind patterns, flows of water bodies, circulations of marine, biotic and non-­human species are only some of the densities that contribute to oceanic anima. As Braudel lays out, the liveness of oceanic landscapes is a critical space for the production of knowledge, as humans finally contend with the depletion of one of the last resources that remained for much of human history outside the purview of humankind: the sea. Historically, the ocean has been an imagined place of infinite plenitude and expansive openness. Its open-­ended horizons overwhelmed much of terrestrially bound social explanations for the production of cognitive imaginaries. Largely documented and narrated by men, their notations, diaries, military and anthropological reportages, maps, missives, letters, logs, inventories, memoirs and analyses have prioritized an archive of the discernable, the perceived, the

Ocean ontologies   41 quantifiable and the demonstrable. Oceanic potentialities open up alternate structures of approaching histories of fluidity. What import does writing about the sea have for a feminist ontology of becoming? Might the condensations, the materialities and the vulnerabilities that surface in thinking through an oceanic modality activate different cognitive reworkings of memory, history, aquatic visuality than hegemonic ones? Does the immanence of the ocean allow for new ways of thinking about decoloniality? Between the archived and the disappeared residual traces? Between Helene Cixous’s abyss and the shore?2 These preoccupations have a distinctly gendered import as their persistent hauntings wash ashore with hidden accounts, repressed memories, buried traces and eroded histories.3 To write from within the ocean, its depths and surfaces, is an ontological task whose momentary immersions are only glimpsed through the folds of the buffeting sea. “Our boats are open” writes Edouard Glissant, “and we sail them for everyone.”4 Glissant’s ocean is the “white wind of the abyss.”5 It is a specific historic space delineated by the immensity of deportations of peoples of African descent into the storm waters. For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others … Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.6 What Glissant draws out is the expansive tension between the memory/history equation posed by Trouillot as the delicate balance between an ontological excavation and epistemological marking. “Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming,” asserts Glissant in his final work.7 It becomes the miasma of connectivity between what happened and what might have happened. Glissant’s “knowledge becoming” is a processual undertaking. It is an activation of slow memory, of unfoldings. Knowledge becoming for Glissant is a methodological disturbance of historical alignments activated through a reflexive historiography. It requires reading between the elisions, the archives and the stones of the decimated landscapes across the former colonies. At its most rigorous, such an analytical approach might allow for an unsettling view of received accounts of arrivals, occupations and interchanges. An unsettling praxis, one that arises out of the disruptive inquiries of strategic refusal, this is an opening to seek within an Indian Ocean discourse. As Sylvia Wynter asserts in her work, “with being human everything is praxis.”8 Facing the liminality of the Indian Ocean as a body of water whose multiple histories and matrixed navigational geographies rupture singular cultural histories, the imperative to attend to the processual, as Wynter hails, is a place of feminist possibility. Of Knowledge becoming. How one might approach the Indian Ocean, what Jeremy Prestholdt calls the quintessential basin of convergence, is the challenge. In Prestholdt’s meticulous analysis of ocean articulations, a map of sea imaginings opens up. The monolithic Indian Ocean dissolves

42   Navigations into a myriad of ontological seas with local mythologies and customary meanings. The Sea of Mombasa, according to Prestholdt, is one imaginative construct. Bahari rum (the Mediterranean) or bahari el-­ali (Persian Gulf ) and bahari ya sham (Red Sea)—are other Swahili conceptions of the coastal littoral. Prestholdt observes that such perceptual usages of the sea have shifted over time, “The epic language of geography offers a valuable window on changing collective perceptions of oceanic space.”9 His study of sea semantics opens up the fluid understandings of oceanic ontologies through which contemporary practices of the sea have evolved. He suggests that for an affective understanding of the Indian Ocean, it is critical to grasp both the scalar limits embedded in the discourses dealing with oceans, as well as to rework normative assumptions that bodies of water, with their modern metageographical identities, operate as singular oceanic entities. The historical reading of oceanic vernaculars by maritime historians suggests that precolonial knowledges of the oceanic were frequently customary and topographical. They were governed by the shape of the coast and the geology of the landmass from whence the definition of the ocean ensues. Seafaring understandings of life have unfolded as economic, mercantile, political and meteorological vernaculars of knowledge. Prestholdt notes that the careful etymological analyses by the historian Markus Vink pointing to darya’i akhzar or Green Sea, or the Arabic bar al Hind or Indian Ocean, and the Chinese Nanyang or Southern Ocean, demonstrate the multiple conceptions of what the space called the Indian Ocean evokes across its circuitous basin.10 These instances suggest that the Indian Ocean’s precolonial ontologies were geographically varied, as well as imbued with the weight of its unfoldings. For instance, pointing to the work of Rila Mukherjee, Prestholdt maps how different parts of the Indian Ocean bore different meanings for Arabic-­speakers. Arabic articulations of the Indian Ocean littoral delineated spheres of oceanic geographies, a macro unified sense of a body of water, as well as a regional language of local seas ringing the different continental landmasses. Bahr al-­Zandj was the western Indian Ocean while bahr al-­Sin referred to the eastern rim.11 The overarching argument Prestholdt brings to bear is the fluctuating and adaptive meanings through which a contemporary practice of the Indian Ocean as imaginary and visual space has burgeoned. Prestholdt proposes that before the European imposition of a metageographical notion of the Indian Ocean, a variety of inflected maritime understandings of contiguous seas existed.12 The disjunctures between imagining the sea, talking about the sea, knowing the sea, living by the sea, working on the sea, mapping the seas and emotionally experiencing the sea, provide a challenging set of frameworks from within which the question of ontologies must be raised. In his discourse on Ethics, Benedict Spinoza argues for the sensuous immanence of non-­human as well as human objects. Writing of the inanimate, Spinoza remarks that all species have varying degrees of spirit in a scale of liveness. Stones washed up along the Malabar shore bear a vitality that is as thick in implications as is the silent sea seeping through the Malabar fishermen’s empty fishing nets. Such a language of human

Ocean ontologies   43 affect is only as elaborate as the forms of knowledge that have been produced around it. Working with that premise, it would follow that a language of oceanic affect is considerably deficient in the history of subjectivities outside those of men. Women and children have customarily been silent commodities in the articulation of ocean ontologies. As Saidiya Hartman’s work illustrates, the challenges of unraveling a decolonial feminist affect requires reading through the gaps and hyper disappearance of the black female subject whose silent screams still reverberate across the chasm of representation.13 The challenge posed by Hartman’s work in the arena of oceanic ontologies is furthered through the emotive mentalities of post-­independence lives refurbished over the forgotten pathways of intimacy, dwelling and the phenomenologies of becoming. Hartman’s unflinching look at oceanic anima probes the reanimation of linguistic phenomenology. What might the visceral and sensuous awakenings of a lost Afro-­Arab-Asian ontology begin to look like along the bahari (sea, in Swahili) of East Africa? Along the kayal (coast, in Malayalam) of the Malabar? As Achille Mbembe points out in the context of postcolonial Africa, the question of non-­essentialist African identities and non-­indigenous African citizenship were fragile avenues of discussion in most African states during the first decades of decolonization. These incomplete engagements within Africa as well as within the South Asian context in the twentieth century produced a catechrysis through which women’s subjectivities were produced across the Indian Ocean littoral. For instance, to African Asians within East Africa, this history of partial citizenship deeply informed what the ocean and its emotional potentialities might be for women across the trans-­oceanic maritime trade. In the context of Tanzania alone, one can chart the transformation of feminist subjectivities emerging in the context of Soviet and Chinese proletarianization of the Tanzanian populace during the mass mobilizations of the late 1960s. The cultivation of citizen-­subjects without the rights to legal citizenship, as Asian Tanzanians experienced the 1960s and 1970s, translated into particular forms of affects for immigrant women from India.

Emergent potentialities “Life is a creative striving (conatus) to maintain and expresses its capacity to establish a norm (affectus),” writes Elizabeth Povinelli.14 This dynamic of becoming, the affective process of realizing human potentiality, is materially embodied in the lost histories of oceanic epistemologies. The architectural and biopolitical remnants of the coastal Anthropocene of the last 600 years attest to a fraught and contested sphere of potentiality, whose vernaculars are only beginning to be excavated. Again, Povinelli: The relationship between human ways of knowing and the things they know—subjects and objects or living humans, fossils and bones—has recently reemerged as a central problematic … what humans can say, and

44   Navigations should say, about the world of things—including humans as objects, as things that can be thought or known.15 Povinelli brings to the fore the challenges of ontological excavation. “What humans can say” is a provocation to interrogate the very structures of narrativity. What humans can say implies how such an exegesis is undertaken. For the sake of argument, the opaque quietude that looms over the nearly 8,000 sea journeys of Dutch colonization evokes a scenario of human potentiality that requires dexterous experimental techniques to even begin to address its historicity. The yawning chasm between the documented, archived, notated disappearance of biopower in the archives of colonial history beseech an affective writing and an embodied evocation. This slow, painful work of affective ethnography is not without its perils, but nevertheless, its rudderless open seas remain the dissolved archive of potentiality. Arguing for a feminist practice of disturbing the way we write and what we can say, Patricia Clough calls for a critical immersion into the technical substrate of memory, or the unconscious in order to bring it to the surface of writing.16 “Experimenting with writing is one way to do this thinking” observes Clough. “Writing experiments are styled in imaginations that yield forms of social criticism.”17 Clough’s call for the self-­reflective imperatives of affective ethnography underlines the symbiotic correlation between writing, the unconscious and locationality. This interdependent process of affective articulation has been most pronounced in recent feminist theorizing of oceanic ontologies, in which notions of the Indian Ocean are deeply imbricated. The path-­breaking work of Suzanne Césaire writing out of the Caribbean during the 1930s and 1940s is one of the earliest sites of oceanic potentiality. Writing during the height of European fascism, French colonization and the struggles for a decolonial imagining across the global South, Césaire writes: “Crammed against the islands are the beautiful green blades of water and silence. Around the Caribbean Sea is the purity of salt.”18 Césaire’s immersion in the Caribbean is phenomenological, “the sea swells, this way, that way, with an effort, a luscious leap, the water stretches out its limbs as it gains greater awareness of its watery strength …” Césaire’s Caribbean Sea is the ferocious entanglement of Vichy violence. And so the conflagration of the Caribbean Sea heaves its silent vapors, binding for the only eyes able to see and suddenly the blues of the Haitian mornes and the Martiniquan bays fade, the most dazzling reds pale, and the sun is no longer a crystal that plays, … if my West Indies are so beautiful, it shows that the great game of hide and seek has succeeded and certainly that day would be too lovely for us to see it.19 Suzanne Césaire establishes one of the foundational formulations for a decolonial, feminist oceanic ontology. In Césaire’s work, the Caribbean Sea is a distinctive space of human potentiality. Its conditions of knowing, its preconditions

Ocean ontologies   45 of becoming and its possibilities of writing are immersive, highly contingent, affective spheres. Césaire’s meticulous attention to what Clough calls the “care to be self-­reflective” is attenuated to the geology of situatedness: Yet it was fifteen years ago that the Caribbean was disclosed to me from the eastern slope of Mount Pelee. From there I realized, as a very young girl, that, as it lay in the Caribbean Sea, Martinique was sensual, coiled, spread out and relaxed, and I thought of the other islands, equally beautiful.20 Césaire’s writing systematically lays down a framework for Clough’s argument regarding the relationship of autoethnographic writing and the conditions of knowledge production. In Césaire’s prose, the Caribbean Sea becomes the space of an “oedipal logic of narrativity” where the symbiosis of separation, identity, historicity and materiality converge.21 The Caribbean in Césaire’s work is an oceanic construct of small island nations whose proximities evoke an interrelationality that their political histories of diverse colonial occupations deter during the 1940s. Césaire’s “lucidity” is a political desire for a space of knowledge production that plumbs “the swirl in the open seas off Puerto Rico in the midst of billows of clouds” to sweep the “length of the Caribbean semicircle.”22 Suzanne Césaire’s carefully articulated historical project of a decolonial ontology is spawned off of the trans-­oceanic tides between the Caribbean and the Atlantic:  Because the thread of unsatisfied desires has caught the Caribbean and America in its trap. Since the Conquistadors arrived and their technology (starting with firearms) developed, not only have the transatlantic lands had their appearance changed they have learned new fears. The Caribbean Sea acquires a distinctive emotive potentiality, a historical specificity and a revolutionary possibility: Here poets feel their heads reeling and, imbibing the fresh odours of the ravines, they seize the spray of the islands, listen to the sound the water makes around them, and see the tropical flames no longer revive the canna, the gerbera, the hibiscus, the bougainvillaea and the flame trees, but instead the hungers, the fears, the hatreds and the ferocity that burns in the hollows of the mornes.23 The biotic varieties of the Caribbean ground both Césaire’s ontological excavation as well as her markings that track the quickly disappearing oceanic particularities that shape her world. The Caribbean in Suzanne Césaire’s writings is a place of oceanic knowledge production whose vast resources are brutally extracted, pillaged, incarcerated and restricted through the complex cartographies of colonization’s avarice between the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Amer­ican dominions over the

46   Navigations small island cultures of the Caribbean. Césaire’s underlying acknowledgment of indigenous societies of the Caribbean erased by settler colonialism is the bedrock from which her theory of emplacement within the oceanic evolves. The Caribbean Sea is oceanic in scale in Césaire’s work. It is an expansive, dense space of linkages between the modern histories of the Caribbean and their terrifying past of genocides, disappearances and violent erasures.24 Unlike the Caribbean’s rich repository of feminist meditations on the ontologies of the ocean, the untamable open waters of the violent Indian Ocean are predominantly documented by male subjectivities along the Malabar Coast. The Malabar shoreline is a harsh, intense landscape of extreme heat, volatile thunderstorms and rolling waves with sudden storm surges. Its hamlets are working waterfronts with millennia of fishing traditions shaped by the weather’s mercurial nature. Rewriting an affective ontology of the Indian Ocean whose emotive vitality shapes so much of epistemological becoming requires a search for a place of writing between potentiality, oceanic matter and self-­reflective writing. It is an an arduous journey of recalibrating scalar attention that occupies the space of the affective turn.25 It is a writing where history’s cognitive entanglements converge with experimental writing methods in an effort to capture the tactile spheres of what Suzanne Césaire calls “social shock.” Building on Césaire’s archive, Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of a psycho-­ affective field of potentiality through which a visual ontology must be contended is crucial to the project of oceanic becoming. Wynter’s analysis of the epistemologies of knowing that constitute the human social sciences have opened up the field of visual ontologies, aesthetics and sensorial affective knowing as an unfinished theoretical undertaking for subjectivities from the global South. She disassembles the constructs of enlightenment discourse through which a decolonial knowing can be understood. To do this, she undertakes an exegesis of the very terms of aesthetic analysis—such as highbrow/ lowbrow, and the “taste of the sense” of the lower classes versus the “taste of reflection” of the middle classes. We are left with the ruins of an imbricated epistemology of “life” and “death,” and of biopower. Wynter hails the reader with the question: what does aesthetics do?26 She poses the inquiry from the locationality of the Caribbean Sea. It is an ontological question of potentiality. Of what is possible to imagine within that hailing for the subject of a protectorate, a territory, a former colony, a dependent economy. Wynter is very clear that the rhetorical doubling within the question, “what does aesthetics do?” is a ghostly aftershock. The implication of the question is, what does aesthetics not do? This is an essential question for a reading of human potentiality within the context of the Caribbean. It is an implication soaked in the mold of the Caribbean’s multiplicities, its fractured colonialities and its decolonial histories separated by languages and competing colonial metropoles. This matrix of competing knowledges informs Wynter’s challenges to move the perceptual question toward a deciphering turn. Wynter poses the idea of deciphering as a process of decolonial demystification.27

Ocean ontologies   47 The stir of the Indian Ocean is thick with a liquid density of unbecoming. Overlaid with the careful unthreading of the history of trade, labor and religious sea journeys, the Benguela and Agulhas drag a deeper materiality into their depths. It is a hybrid culture of social consciousness fomented along its uneven shorelines. Salty, thick with sisal and jute, fabric and wood, the eroding materiality of the Indian Ocean’s vitality arrests the inhabitant along its coastal shores, at Bagamoyo, at Mombasa, at Dar es Salaam, at Zanzibar. The steady throbbing of the ocean’s churn lulls the historian into a languid exhaustion in the face of Wynter’s deciphering practice. Omani, Indian, German, Portuguese, Arab and Swahili are only some of the folds of habit and memory that envelop the sea air along the Dar es Salaam waterfront. The thick fort stones, the heavy smooth seawalls now underwater speak of atrocities long forgotten along the Quilon waterfront. The deciphering practice, however, is an active process of engagement through emplacement. It is not a deciphering that leads to a linear coherence. Rather, it is a conjunctural history of oceanic ontology that can only be partially construed through sites of loss. Yet, it is a becoming that is tangibly vital; the porosity of the coastline is vibrant in its liveness. The acrid odor of colonization and the resulting deciphering process of repossessing the past is an organic process along the Malabar Coast. The ocean’s ferocity and its furious intensities overwhelm the fragile monuments to Western dominion at Varkhala, south of Quilon. It is a tempestuous and volatile crescendo of disentangling the multiple modernities assailing the Indian Ocean’s shores at Cape Agulhas. The ontology of the Indian Ocean is distinctive in its potentiality. Filled with the sounds of competing belief systems—Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Persian, Christian, Buddhist—its syncretic fabrication embellishes the vast shorelines on either side of its expansiveness. It is this unprecedented commingling of cultures, traditions, habitations and languages that demarcates the uniquely integrated and networked oceanic space of the Indian Ocean as a tactile sphere of experience. It is more than an aquatic space of transaction. Its liquid provenance produces the very potentialities forged through violence, contact, embeddedness and travel. The unifying harsh white light of the tropical sun along the fast eroding sandy coastlines reflect the sunken lifetimes through which an imagining of the present is possible. This is where Wynter’s deciphering practice becomes a tool of excavation and of engagement, to navigate the ocean of loss, of retrieval, of reassemblage. This deciphering occurs through a name, a tree, a cultural practice, a deity. What Arjun Appadurai has outlined as “the social life of things.”28 Sitting along the harsh stones of the old Portuguese Fort in Quilon, the slough of the Indian Ocean is visceral. The lingering smell of its shores reminds one of seaweed, fish and foam, along with forgotten betrayals and concubinage.

Notes   1 Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 3.   2 Helene Cixous, “Preface” in The Helene Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers, (London: Routledge, 1994).

48   Navigations   3 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 8.   4 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 9.   5 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8.   6 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8.   7 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1.   8 Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 34.   9 Jeremy Prestholdt, “Locating the Indian Ocean: Thoughts on the Postcolonial Reconstitution of Space in Eastern Africa,” Journal of Eastern African Studies (Special Collection: Pirates, Preachers, and Politics along the African Indian Ocean Coast) 9:3 (2015): 440–476. 10 Markus P.M. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies and the New Thalassology,” Journal of Global History 2:1 (2007): 58. 11 Rila Mukherjee, “Introduction: Bengal and the Northern Bay of Bengal,” in Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Before Colonialism, ed. Rila Mukherjee (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), 63. 12 Jeremy Prestholdt, “Locating the Indian Ocean,” 440–476. 13 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 14 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 96. 15 Povinelli, Geontologies, 69. 16 Patricia Tincineto Clough, “Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory,” in Auto Affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 17 Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Ontological Perspective of Knowledge Object” in Auto Affection, 155. 18 Suzanne Césaire, “The Great Camouflage” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, eds. and trans. by Michael Richardson-­Krzystof Fijalkowski (London: Verso, 1996), 159. 19 Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” 161. 20 Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” 157. 21 Patricia Ticineto Clough, The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998). 22 Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” 156. 23 Césaire, “The Great Camouflage,” 161. 24 Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 25 Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 26 Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice” in Ex-­iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 250, 253. 27 Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’ ,” 266. 28 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Ocean ontologies   49

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Braudel, Fernand. Memory and the Mediterranean. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Césaire, Suzanne. “The Great Camouflage.” In Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, edited and translated by Michael Richardson-­Krzystof Fijalkowski. London: Verso, 1996. Cixous, Helene. “Preface.” In The Helene Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers. Routledge: London, 1994. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. The End(s) of Ethnography: from Realism to Social Criticism. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Introduction.” In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Ontological Perspective of Knowledge Object.” In Auto Affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Clough, Patricia Tincineto. “Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory.” In Auto Affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McKittrick, Katherine. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Mukherjee, Rila. “Introduction: Bengal and the Northern Bay of Bengal.” In Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Before Colonialism. Delhi: Primus Books, 2011. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice.” In Ex-­iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye Cham. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992.

4 Contested visuality

Shock is the neural snap of modernity. It is the shortcircuiting of perception. Shock is Galileo’s gasp  as he peers through the telescope for the first time. It is Columbus’s surprise. Shock is Vasco da Gama’s exhilaration  at the discovery of the sea route to India. It is Olaudah Equiano’s startled horror aboard the slave ship. Shock is the scandal of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, belting “merdre!” across the Theatre de l’Oeuvre in the Paris of 1896. The synaptic arrest of the imperial bayonet. The gory first blood of the shocktroops of battle. Shock catapults the modern. Shock is the avant-­garde.

I Shock of modernity For the first decade of my teaching life in the United States, I taught a graduate seminar on the history of the historical avant-­garde in New York City. Having trained with the modern Indian environmental and dance theater cultures of South India, I acquired my PhD in theater and was immersed in the transformative histories of the Amer­ican and European avant-­garde. Prior to that, I had studied English Literature in Madras during the early eighties, where theater was a lively and contentious mode of engagement. I considered myself to have evolved out of an Indian avant-­garde performance tradition at the juncture of political theater, environmental theater, ritual and folk theater traditions, and dance codifications drawn from the vast and rich array of movement traditions across India, specifically Bharata Natyam, which I had trained in. I had also imbibed family traditions from Kerala of Kalaripayatti and Chautu Nadagam, movement techniques that were part of everyday cultural life rather than an exotic practice in Kerala. The challenge on arrival for doctoral study in theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the mid-­1980s meant that all of my earlier training, with some of the most interesting theater minds of Madras with a deep commitment to theater as a decolonial practice, became invisible.

Contested visuality   51 There was not a language of the visual available in 1980s United States. In addition, there was no access to the experimental work I had explored with the body in Madras, nor in Bangalore where I had gone to college. I wanted to understand why the kinds of questions that a Karen Finley or a Holly Hughes could ask in the New York of the 1980s was not historically available to me at the time. Why was the question of the decolonial body, in all its materiality, impossible to access even in the 1980s? Why was nakedness, for instance, simply not a historical option for me at the time? However faddish and hip it was in the performance circuits, theoretically at least, it was not an option for a postcolonial subject. I struggled with the intertwined yet historically different productions of the body—that of my own theater training in India, and my exposure to the Western avant-­garde’s formal innovations. Intellectuals such as Gayatri Spivak, Michael Taussig and Edward Said had begun to chart the epistemologies of decolonization, and what drove me to eventually write this chapter was my comparative understanding of the historic avant-­garde across the geopolitical spectrum. Suddenly Europe’s daring experiments with the body, its visual boldness at a time when entire sections of the planet were colonized and incapacitated by the very cultures staging avant-­garde gestures of self realization, began to unravel as a history of shock. Shock captures the neural calibration of the modern sensibility. The Indian Ocean, the space between Africa, the Middle East and Asia, becomes a liminal space in this rupture with the past, an aquatic delirium in the global imaginary for the logic of the modern, emerging out of the Middle Ages. It is at once a secret narrative about an accidental discovery around Cabo das Tormentoso in 1488, later to be renamed Cabo das Bon Esperanca by the Portuguese, and Kaap de Goede Hoope, by the Dutch. The apocryphal story goes like this: a seafaring dreamer sets sail into unknown waters in January of 1488 seeking a new route to India around the African continent. He is a novice of the South Easterly and Westerly winds. The sailing is fraught with dangers. Pirates off the coast of Guinea, rough winds, a restless caravel. Still, the sunrises are splendid, with the sun rising behind the land mass and setting into the sea. As the journey proceeds, Bartolomeu Dias and his crew are swept into a stormy turbulence, buffeted in a blanket of rain and darkness for nearly a month as they veer toward the Antarctic. Disoriented and with poor visibility, Dias commands a northerly course. After ceaseless weeks of cold gales and icy waves, the ship finally finds itself in calm waters on February 3, 1488. Puzzled, Dias observes the sun setting behind the landmass instead of rising in front of it, as it had previously.1 The next morning, he observes the sun rising across the curving ocean, instead of behind the shore. In a flash, Dias realizes that the storm has tossed his ship around the Southern tip of the African landmass. The path to Asia had just unexpectedly opened up. For Europe, it is a breathtaking moment, unparalleled in Dias’s time. For Africa and Asia, a horrific trembling surges across the Benguela. The shock of modernity.

52   Navigations

Ii Arrested visuality Acrid and sulfurous with the stench of the shocktroops of battle: World War I is often invoked as the crucible of modern sensibility. An urtext of shock, its neural distortions and arrested visuality had been triggered by mustard gas, the first nerve agent of chemical warfare. This war is also the last brutal performance of tangible, hand-­to-hand combat in the Western world. As Martin Jay observes, it marks the chasm before the sanitized madness of the bomb: The western front’s interminable trench warfare … created a bewildering landscape of indistinguishable, shadowy shapes, illuminated by lightning flashes of blinding intensity, and then obscured by phantasmagoric, often gas-­induced haze. The effect was even more visually disorienting than those produced by … the railroad, the camera, or the cinema. When all that the soldier could see was the sky above and the mud below, the traditional reliance on visual evidence for survival could no longer be easily maintained.2 As Jay elaborates, twentieth-­century visual modernity is forged out of this blinding intensity and gas-­induced haze whose lesser-­known scenarios include the hidden colonial theaters of war outside Europe’s borders. Jay emphasizes a shattering of the optical spectrum within Western aesthetics as a fundamentally new moment within the field of the senses. It is cataclysmic upheaval, but for those hidden outside the field of Martin Jay’s vision, it is one preceded by another moment that propelled the dissolution of the world as it was then known: 1492. As Sylvia Wynter visualizes it, in 1492, four years after Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cabo de Tormentoso (later the Cabo de Bon Esperanca) a New World view had come into focus. In her groundbreaking essay, “1492: A New World View,” Wynter shakes up the pivotal reading of the events around that moment as a sign of the angel of history, grasped within in the contested visuality of sightings, framings and meanings. Wynter rhetorically asks: should the events of 1492 be seen from the celebrant perspective as a triumph for the Christian West that was to liberate the indigenous peoples from their Stone Age? Or should they be seen as genocidal extinction and ecological disasters that had been unprecedented in human history?3

Iii Women of Algiers Consider Assia Djebar’s notes on Eugène Delacroix’s reminiscences of Algeria in 1832 following the French invasion in 1830: On June 25, 1832, Delacroix disembarked at Algiers for a short stopover. He had just spent a month in Morocco, immersed in an atmosphere of extraordinary visual richness (sumptuous costumes … the opulence of a royal court … lions, tigers). That Orient, so near and with which he was contemporary, spread itself before him in total and excessive novelty. It was the

Contested visuality   53 Orient as he had dreamed of it for The Death of Sardanapalus. But here it was free from any trace of the notion of sin.… Morocco was thus the meeting place for the dream and the incarnation of the esthetic ideal, the site of a visual revolution. So much so that soon after Delacroix would write in his journal, “People and things appear to me in a new light since my trip.”4 This is a time when all of Africa and much of Asia are colonized spaces. For the European avant-­garde, the search for fresh ways of perceiving the world is to be immersed in the economy of the new, embodied by colonial transactions and seductive avenues of international trade in African artifacts, Oriental commodities and exotic human exhibits. All this is happening simultaneously with an increased militarization of European forces—French, British, Portuguese and Dutch—in Indochina, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.5 Within this stranglehold of desire and power, Europe’s sense of social and aesthetic norms are dramatically shaped by the collision with its colonies and their multilayered sensorial regimes. Beginning with Delacroix and Baudelaire, the circulation of slaves, tea, cocoa, perfumes, coffee, cardamom, cloves, opium, mahogany and other tropical commodities transforms the modern European imagination. The hermetic spheres of avant-­garde experience in cities like London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Moscow are interrupted by the ephemeral urban brushing alongside colonized peoples from Third World sites. Again, Djebar: “Delacroix brought back souvenirs from his visit to this place—slippers, a scarf, a blouse, a pair of trousers, not as banal tourist trophies, but as tangible proof of a unique and fleeting experience. Traces of a dream.” This dream remains etched in Delacroix’s 1834 painting, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, which Djebar describes as “something unbearable, something present here and now.”6 And yet, as the field of intimate undertakings between Europe and its colonies deepens, urban jostlings underscore the contradictions emerging in notions of self, freedom and radical subjectivity.

Iv Tactility and the visual The fundamental assumption behind the various movements of the avant-­garde in the arts was that relations between art and society had fundamentally changed; old ways of looking at the world were inadequate and new ways must be found. This assumption was correct. However, according to Eric Hobsbawm in The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-­Century Avant-­Gardes, this could never have been achieved in the visual arts, nor could it be achieved by the projects of the avant-­garde.7 Assessing the reach of the avant-­garde across the new technologies of the visual, Hobsbawm elaborates upon Walter Benjamin’s argument that painting and sculpture, the legitimate arts of the nineteenth century, could no longer capture the sensibility of the new era. Hobsbawm writes, … among all the arts, the visual ones have been particularly handicapped … they have patently failed … the project was abandoned, leaving behind

54   Navigations avant-­gardes which became a sub-­department of marketing … “the smell of impending death.”8 Hobsbawm argues that the pioneering technologies of photography, film, architecture and design better express the changing tempo of those eras because their means of expression resonate with the escalation of speed and the compression of time. These mediums capture the dislocation of modern individualism in the nations of Europe and their extended empires. For Hobsbawm, the decline of painting and sculpture is superseded by the new technologies of the tactile. The arts he privileges are those that shift the sense of the haptic toward the sphere of mechanical reproduction, such as design and advertising, most effectively embodied by the London subway map of the 1930s. As an innovative realization of the new aesthetic, the London Underground map embodies the junction between the visual, the proprioceptive, the mechanical and the technological. It incorporates abstract minimalist design into a functionalist object that is utilitarian and democratic, an aspect crucial to the emerging aesthetic of the modern for Hobsbawm. However, this seduction of design and technology is grounded in the uneasy global scenario of uncomfortable alliances between advertising, colonialism, slavery and imperialism. Hobsbawm’s modern preoccupation with tactility was already preceded by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who was nervous about the aesthetics of shock at the turn of the century. Writing in Berlin in 1908, Simmel’s essay “The Stranger,” expresses shock as the increasing democratization of the urban public and the consequent increase of strangers in the familiar streets of his city. For Simmel, the expansion of cities means the demise of the volk-­gemeinschaft (the folk worldview)—that distinctly local sensibility that made his Berlin neighborhood of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century familiar and comforting. Simmel’s resistance to the heterogenization of his city is a resistance to the speed of perceptual shock, the flow of the modern that is disconcertingly embodied by the foreigner, the stranger, and most alarmingly, the immigrant.9 Following Simmel in his seminal 1934 essay, “The Techniques of the Body,” Marcel Mauss identifies tactility as the new sign of the modern. Tactility for Mauss is the sphere of action, touch, sensation and feeling. Mauss proposes tactility as a technology of the body that is critical to gauging the new sensibilities of cognitive shock. He begins his analysis in 1895, a period of accelerated preoccupation with perceptual shifts and non-­visual sensory inputs brought on by new ideas of scale, speed, height and practices of proprioception. Mauss’s theory of tactility observes bodies as they move and perform through public spheres and everyday social practices such as walking, running, training, marching, squatting, drinking and dancing. He carefully distinguishes between the tactility of the stage and the tactility of the everyday: “Technical action, physical action, magico-­religious action are confused for the actor. These are the elements I had at my disposal.”10 This distinction between the tactility of the everyday and the semantics of movement on stage is crucial to an understanding of the communicative dimension of touch within the modern imagination. Toward this broader

Contested visuality   55 historic understanding, Mauss offers a theory of action that is performative while also located in what he calls “the total social fact: actions of a mechanical, physical, or physico-­chemical order.”11 It fleshes out techniques of the self through which modern bodies are constituted. Mauss’s theory of tactility encompasses that same montage of manners and gestures that lead Charles Baudelaire to observe in 1860, “that every age had its own gait, glance, and gesture.”12 They make available a methodology for translating itinerant, corporeal transferences between peoples across cultural chasms and interactions that are normally unarticulated. Baudelaire’s notion of tactility is a critical interjection in the discourse on the avant-­garde. For Baudelaire, the urban is the theater of modernity and its vernacular is tactile as well as ocular. It is amidst “the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite” that one experiences that sensation of being gripped by a surging present. The great landscape of the city generates “an immense reservoir of electrical energy” that inspires the spectator into a state of nervous shock.13 Experienced between the spectacular street, the specular eye and the pandemonious stage, shock captures what language fails to articulate: the phantasmagoria of the new. From within this inspirational shudder Baudelaire writes: By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Every old master has had his own modernity: the great generations are clothed in the costume of their own period. They are perfectly harmonious, because everything— from costume and coiffure down to gesture, glance, and smile (for each age has a deportment, a glance and a smile of its own)—everything, I say, combines to form a completely viable whole.14 This total work of art, the “viable whole” imagined by Baudelaire happens as counter-­resistance to the tightly controlled spectacle of the Wagnerian stage. The “viable whole” is the unpredictable street, the Crimean battlefields and the gifted ethnographic eye of Constantin Guys, whose mobile drawings capture it. In these spaces of the everyday, the chancing upon the other (Turkey, India, Egypt) through travel, images, luxury commodities and bodies on the street catalyzes a layered sense of an evolving contemporaneity. The body and its capacity for tactile sensations pull the experience of the avant-­garde into the realm of the everyday changing street. This is the urban sensation of shock that explodes the palimpsestic city into a site of performative distraction.15

V Perceptual shock By the early 1900s, the Futurists programmatically laid out this sense of the relationship between the body, technology, speed, the fascination with the other and that of perceptual shock within the urban.16 In F.T. Marinetti’s writings, the ­palimpsest of Africa, the “Orient,” and the urban grips his feverish vision of a

56   Navigations technologized utopia and punctuates the opening of his manifesto, a relentless erasure of all but his youthful, masculine, European self. We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.17 Perceptual shock for Marinetti is the heady disconnect of modernity’s possibilities. It is a furious embrace of the future that is expansionist and ultimately fascistic in its obsession with a technologized self that glorifies the tactile machine: We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot: we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blaxing with violent electric moons, greedy railway stations that devour smoke-­plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives … deep-­chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.18 This is a nihilistic sense of the modern that leaves little accountability for the undulating space of modernity as a dialectical expression of history and an intimately experienced multiplicity. “The tides of revolution in the modern capitals,” Marinetti continues: O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse.19 Marinetti’s recollection of his childhood perpetuates the falsely utopian sense that modernity can evolve without the catastrophic underbelly of imperialism and exploitation displaced to the periphery of Europe. For the Futurists, shock remains an exploration of sensation through formal movement, as in photodynamism or noise. While this shock is energetically pulsing in their manifestos, the messier technological forays of Fascist Italy into Sudan and Ethiopia remain the silent subtext.

Contested visuality   57

Vi Aesthetic savagery “Socialism or Barbarism” is a manifesto written in 1949 by a radical, political group of left-­wing intellectuals in Paris. Contextualizing it, Cornelius Castoriadis writes about how the colonies were imminently tactile theaters of violence that foregrounded guns, pillaging and torture—and the aesthetics behind these objects of torture were being designed and constructed: The struggle for colonies became the main expression of the antagonisms between various monopolies and imperialist nations … in which the “advanced” capitalist countries could indulge in the direct and brutal appropriation of wealth and … they could sell their products.20 Achille Mbembe furthers Castoriadis’s observation and posits that the aftershock of these imperial machinations continued to percolate and shape the narrative expressivities of the post-­independence era of creative decoloniality. According to Mbembe, the colony persistently haunts as a primal scene in African writings of the self; it is the body that gives substance and weight to subjectivity, something one not only remembers but continues to experience viscerally long after its formal disappearance.21 These violent affects were as relevant to the imagination of the avant-­garde as the emerging technologies of glass and steel. It was the voyeuristically visceral spectacle of colonial horrors that drew European travelers like Eugène Delacroix, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Leiris and George Bataille toward Africa and the colonized South. The promise of an aesthetic savagery through the trope of the “exotic” activated a shattering of the modern European sensibility.22

Vii Visual singularity, visual pathology An itinerant wandering into the somatic adventures of the historical avant-­garde dredges mutations that surface outside the language of the visual. It presents a volatile mise-­en-scène of sensations catalyzed by colonizers and brutally felt by the colonized.23 “Can we so easily separate visual singularity from visual pathology?” asks Fred Moten. “Might it not be necessary to hear and sound the singularity of the visage? How do sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundary of the visual?”24 Set adrift by sea voyages, the discursive distortions and leaps of the non-­ocular offer a glimpse into the inchoate yet distinctively new experiences of being modern that unfold at the juncture of differing sensoriums—simultaneously Western and non-­Western. In Moten’s epistemological reworking of what it means to be of the decolonial “avant-­garde,” sound occupies the place of shock. The moan, the shout and the scream erupt as the contestory avant-­garde to the hegemonic avant-­garde of Anglo European history. Again, Moten: “Sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.”25 Between the moan and the scream, the shout and the chant, an immediate and raw sphere of encounter is forced open through

58   Navigations trans-­oceanic interchanges: the Dutch in Asia, the Portuguese in India and Africa, the Spanish in the Americas, and their cumulative colonial outposts spread across the hemispheres. Other European colonial presences follow, establishing an intricate inter-­oceanic network of trade in human cargoes, travel and collecting. The visual is held petrified in the vicegrip of colonial shock. Headless torsos. Decapitated hands. Burnt limbs. Flayed bodies. Picasso? Dalí? Or the French torture chambers of Hanoi and Algiers?

Viii Angel of history A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.26 Historically, shock embodies the shift from the medieval to the modern and is synonymous with the fracturing of the modern sensorial field. It is Walter Benjamin’s startled angel of history flailing backward, face aghast. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shock is not ethically possible and yet, it shapes the earliest theorizing of perceptual modernity in its many dimensions.27 It is the spasmodic contortions of imperial violence, imploding with the World Trade Center and strategized as the “shock and awe” unleashed on Baghdad. As Jean-­Francois Lyotard suggests, shock is a simulated echo that is disconnected from the political.28 Scandal is irrelevant. The avant-­garde—the logic of Cartesian space shattered into fractals—fragmented time and space. The neat categories of modernity and progress that frame the boundaries of modern subjectivity explode in Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic image of the angel careening backward, mouth agape as if in shock. This kinetic picture of a celestial messenger in free fall, suspended in mid-­movement as the storm of progress propels him away, captures, between swiveling face and plummeting body, the space of the inarticulable within the modern. It is the churning space of volatility between systems of knowledge. Caught between the ocular and the aural, the petrified eyes and startled mouth, the structuring logics of progress lie shadowed amidst the language of the visual and the literary. No one understood this epistemological quandary better than Benjamin, whose own inquiry into the nature of modernity in a time that “had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance” leads him to experiment with the “technique of awakening” through the prism of tactility. For

Contested visuality   59 ­ enjamin, awakening is “a process that goes on in the life of the individual as in B the life of generations … sleep is its initial stage.” He continues, “Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned toward dreams, the child side.”29

Ix Disemboweled silence This Benjaminian dreamscape liquesces multiple space/time configurations. For the colonized, this awakening takes the form of a nightmare from whose electrical spasms waking is painfully deferred. From within this insomniac nightscape, Aimé Césaire writes: “My only consolation is that periods of colonization pass, that nations sleep only for a time, and that peoples remain.”30 For Césaire, sleep is the space of a historic horror in which the colonized subject is banished from his childhood, while simultaneously, he is forever infantilized into a child state. Sleep: the tormented wakefulness of the fearful in a world bereft of child-­ like innocence; the convulsive shock of colonial brutality from which any potential toward awakening must be dreamt.31 Frantz Fanon writes painfully from within this dismembered somatic space: Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.32 Therein lies the tension between the playfulness of the European psyche staged through the avant-­garde and the political implications of surrealist reinventions in the writings of colonial intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon. Benjamin offers a historically dynamic method of translating this deathly epistemic wrangle between modern technological and industrial “progress” and the internalized subjectivity of the people who are affected by it. Elaborating on tactility, his angel intimately comingles the body in shock. The ethereal being in free fall embodies the convergence of the material, the imaginative and the utopian shifts of interiority: The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!—Therefore: remembering and awakening are most intimately related.33 Experiencing the present as waking world. Now the traumatic space forged by  the “shock of the new” is revealed in the seismic rupture forged between colonialism and modernity. Both European and non-­European people are affected by it.

60   Navigations Benjamin’s attention to tactility interrupts any illusions that there can be some removed, hermetic experience of an initiated elite. He invites a perceptual reconsideration of syncretisms that shaped uneven notions of radical affect in the rapidly transnationalizing imagination of the twentieth century.

X Distracted awakening Jean-­Paul Sartre’s impassioned introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth acknowledges this shock of awakening: For we in Europe too are being decolonized; that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the striptease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions.34 Holding no punches back, Aimé Césaire unflinchingly observes in his 1953 treatise Discourse on Colonialism: First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, … we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, and each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact … a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of … all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured … all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe … the continent proceeds toward savagery.35 Fraught dialogues between colonized and colonizer inflect the deeper implications of what it means to break new ground or be on the cutting edge of history. Social relationships in metropoles and colonized cities blast open, literally and metaphorically, a sphere of historically new experiences weaving the power differentials between perceptual vernaculars. Again, Césaire: And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And … they hide the truth … that it is barbarism … that … before they were its

Contested visuality   61 victims, they were its accomplices; … that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-­ European peoples; that … they are responsible for it, and that … it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.36 Under such violent conditions, colonial self-­improvisations and decolonial assertions of sovereignty do not translate as avant-­garde in any formal sense. Yet, they simultaneously catalyze a distinctly pathbreaking performative sphere that is ahead of its time. As Frantz Fanon observes in Black Skin, White Mask, to walk down a street in Marseille during the 1940s is an avant-­garde act and the degree of shock it generates is a distinct social experience: “Look, a Negro!”37 It is a petrifying moment when Fanon’s own cosmopolitan view of himself is shattered through the fear of a little boy, who upon seeing him approach on the sidewalk proclaims: “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”38 Fanon writes, “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.”39 These histories suggest an oblique reconsideration of the early twentieth century. They dislodge radical aesthetic developments and allow for a distracted ethnography that foregrounds a non-­ocular modernity. The language of the visual, however, obscures the implications of the tactile as the sign of the modern. Sight determines the dialect of historical disruption.

Xi Epistemic violence In his introduction to Black Skin, White Mask, Homi Bhabha writes: From within the metaphor of vision complicit with a Western metaphysic of Man emerges the displacement of the colonial relation. The Black presence ruins the representative narrative of Western personhood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and degeneracy … its present, dismembered and dislocated.… The White man’s eyes break up the Black man’s body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed.40 This disturbed vision signals a world that bursts between the snap of the photographer’s fingers and the camera-­eye’s mise-­en-scène; a world that flares between the performer’s interest in movement and touch, and the architect’s vision for new kinds of spaces for people to traverse. In the colonized cities of Algiers, Calcutta and Dakar—as well as in the metropoles of Paris, London, New York and Amsterdam—affect is reinvented by migrant colonials.41 Lacking a prism to translate its social practices into a historical narrative of modernity’s transmutations, this disturbed vision dissolves against the hardscape of the city. Within the crucible of revolution and change, tactile shock spews forth as a performative sensorium for dispossessed peoples across the North/South, East/West divide.

62   Navigations

Xii Ethnographic shock Transnational consciousness percolates writing on the avant-­garde; writing that reflexively interrogates the paradox of inscribing the self-­absorbed eye of Europe from within. This is writing that is conscious of its own narrative of modernity as distinctly Western. The case of Antonin Artaud, ravaged by another kind of neurological distanciation through the use of drugs during the 1930s, foreground this deep-­state of devolution: Bardo is the death throes in which the ego falls in a puddle, and there is in electroshock a puddle state through which everyone traumatized passes … it plunges the shocked into that rattle with which we leave life … what the Tarahumaras of Mexico call the spittle of the grater, the cinder of toothless coal.42 Visiting Mexico for one year in 1936, Artaud immerses himself with the indigenous Tarahumara of Mexico. Artaud’s experiments with indigineity in the Americas transfigures into an experience of ethnographic shock in perceptual unbecoming. His Tarahumara writings, created over the last decade of his life, express this undoing of Western rationality into a “puddle state”—similar to the way he had understood the ruins of World War II. The electroshock of his own declining mental state reflect Artaud’s sense that the tenets of western rationality had come undone. The West was bankrupt and it was the Tarahumara and their ecological comprehension of the world that could offer any redemptive potentiality for the burnt, starved and depleted Europe of the 1940s. For Artaud, projecting the capacity for ecological awareness onto the indigenous Tarahumara and their traditional ways was a tool to access alternative knowledge. Even as the Tarahumara were being forcibly incorporated into the Mexican state apparatus, he sought an otherwise to Western rationality through trance.

Xiii Stylized barbarity Working as a young journalist for Socialism or Barbarism, Jean-­Francois Lyotard gazes unnervingly into the quagmire of enlightenment rationality. His experiences in Constantine, Algeria, from 1950 to 1952 shock him into wrestling with the uneven spaces that have been edited out of narratives of modernity. Later in his life, his writings begin to explore inadequacies in the teleological model of development and progress that underlies the stories the modern likes to tell, particularly the oft-­repeated stories of avant-­garde genius and genesis: One can note a sort of decay in the confidence placed by the two last centuries in the idea of progress. This idea of progress as possible … was rooted in the certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge, and liberty would be profitable to mankind as a whole.… After two centuries,

Contested visuality   63 we are more sensitive to signs that signify the contrary. Neither economic nor political liberalism … emerge from the sanguinary last two centuries free from the suspicion of crimes against mankind.… Following Theodor Adorno, I use the name of Auschwitz to point out the irrelevance of … the modern claim to help mankind to emancipate itself.43 For Lyotard, as for the Frankfurt School, the barbarity of the civilizing mission lay in the ruins of Auschwitz, a testament to the failure of the modern project’s ultimate design. Echoing Lyotard’s sentiments and writing self-­consciously from within the extreme horror of imperial modernity’s break with reason, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism spells out the double bind between the European avant-­garde and its colonial, and eventually postcolonial, other. Responding to the prominent anthropologist Roger Caillois’s ethnological blind spot, Césaire writes ironically: Just think of it! M. Caillois has never eaten anyone! M. Caillois has never dreamed of finishing off an invalid! It has never occurred to M. Caillois to shorten the days of his aged parents! Well, there you have it, the superiority of the West … compared to the cannibal, the dismemberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the incarnation of respect for human dignity.… But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-­darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers … those authentic marks of respect for human dignity … called … “electricity,” “the bath-­tub,” and “the bottleneck.”44 Here, Césaire draws out the ethnological and historical conditions that inform the very semantics of performing, collecting, producing, archiving and recording within the French imagination. Writing in 1955, Césaire’s scathing critique of Caillois suggests how the struggle for postcolonial sovereignty is the backdrop against which surrealist modernity unfolds. The decadent bourgeoisie of the European avant-­garde swing from chandeliers—Phillipe Soupault does just this in the famed banquet for the Symbolist poet Saint-­Pol-Roux. As colonial subjectivity struggles to be humanized and recognized as modern, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí slit cow eyes in their film, Un Chien Andalou.45 European subjectivity ironically performs a stylized barbarity while colonial subjectivity contends with a biologically determined savagery imposed by Western scientific constructs.46 For a “native” from Africa or Indochina to arise as an individual rather than merely as a native or indigène in Paris or in their colonized homelands requires an extraordinary amount of self-­invention in the face of a debilitating effacement of subjecthood. To fashion modern subjecthood in the public sphere of the street, the marketplace, the café and the French Communist Party becomes an avant-­ gardist act par excellence for the colonized. This shock of the new escapes the

64   Navigations radar of bourgeois Western codes. To walk down the streets of Marseilles, as Fanon does in the 1940s; to work as a photographer, as Ho Chi Minh does in the 1920s; to interrogate the workings of seamen and longshoremen in the steaming coal hulls of the steamships of Marseille, as Claude McKay does during the 1920s for his novel Banjo (1929); to explore ritual and trance in Haiti, as Zora Neale Hurston and Katharine Dunham do—all of these artists suggest a wider social sphere of a living, breathing avant-­garde within a quotidian social practice that coexists alongside the more visible—and marketable—stagings of Europe’s avant-­garde coterie.

Xiv Avant-­garde and the subalterns of history Roland Barthes writes that the avant-­garde is always a way of celebrating the death of the bourgeoisie, for its own death still belongs to the bourgeoisie—but further than this, the avant-­garde cannot go.47 The social map in which Barthes traces a matrix of modernity is one that is interconnected with the global history of colonial expansion connecting the French, British, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Spanish and Portuguese to Asia, Africa and the New World by the nineteenth century.48 It is the juncture where the avant-­gardes cross paths with the subalterns of history. This material interface of historical meshing is an intricate, global network of arrivals and departures, thefts and givings, influences and rejections, circulations and still points. This trace of the modern begins with Baudelaire’s travels to Mauritius in 1841 and his obsessions with Jeanne Duval, a mulatto actress who played roles at the Theatre de la Porte Sainte-­Antoine in Paris in 1842. A century later, in 1948, it locates Artaud in Rodez and Fanon in Blida Joineville, Algeria. Studying psychoanalysis and the effects of French methods of torture on the Algerians, Fanon’s work is a groundbreaking exploration of the effects of colonial torture techniques on both the colonizer and the colonized.49 This ever-­shifting and in-­flux transnational mapping impacts continental thinking about notions of the new. André Breton’s numerous tracts, particularly “Freedom is a Vietnamese Word” (1947), consciously stage this epistemic rupture through his vociferous protests against French imperialist aggression in Indochina. Condemning the fierce repression perpetrated by the French under the name of democracy, Breton writes: It is impossible to maintain freedom here while imposing slavery there.… Surrealism … vigorously protests the imperialist aggression and addresses its fraternal salute to those who incarnate, at this very moment, the becoming of freedom.50 Breton’s deployment of surrealist activity as a strategy for social transformation that includes decolonization as its sphere of engagement highlights the very interdependent scenario of abjection and emancipation molding the avant-­garde project. For Breton, the “shock of the new” includes the barrel of the gun as well

Contested visuality   65 as conversations with intellectuals and political theorists such as the Martiniquan Aimé Césaire, the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor, and the Haitians René Depestre, Jean Price-­Mars and Clément Magloire-­Saint-Aude. Crossings such as these situate the aesthetic breakthroughs of the European avant-­garde against the invention of modern sovereign states such as Vietnam, Senegal, Haiti and Martinique, with their struggles for self-­determination inspired by political Surrealists such as Ho Chi Minh, Leopold Senghor, René Depestre and Aimé Césaire. Its transnational cartography underscores the intertwined landscapes of France, Indochina, the Caribbean and North Africa. Despite contemporary assumptions that it is no longer possible to be “avant­garde” (in the sense that Richard Kostelanetz defines it: “those out front, forging a path that others will take”), fetishizing and upholding a standard for art that is “ahead of its time,” poses a conundrum. It invokes a whole set of assumptions that are at once local, national and global.51 Underlying these aesthetic discourses is the perceived cultural time lag between the European avant-­garde movements and “Third World” modernisms. There is a perceived absence of innovations in Africa and Asia, and an assumed dearth of innovation compared to what the Futurists, Dadaists and the Surrealists were exploring around the body, text, performance and movement. But this mistaken perception only foregrounds the striking discontinuities between the well archived and researched terrain of the European avant-­garde and the paucity of documentation on modern innovations outside the tribal and the folkloristic of African and Asian subjectivity prior to the decolonization movements of the 1940s and 1950s.52

Xv Surreality as remorse From our vantage point in history, a temporal notion of shock is no longer possible. Referring to World War II Lyotard argues that: Modernity consists in working at the limits of what was thought to be generally accepted, in … the arts, in the sciences, in matters of technology, and in politics.… This work of testing limits also bears the name of the avant-­ garde. In the contemporary epoch, fashions often shield themselves with the title of the avant-­garde. This is not always accurate.… It may well be the case that one has to wait a long time to find out whether the title of avant-­ garde is deserved.53 Shock under such conditions takes on a new intensity, and a new urgency. What does it take to shock in our time? Is shock useful as an aesthetic and political strategy? Lyotard suggests (referring to his generation) that “what is new about this generation is its unconquerable appetite for the concrete.”54 This appetite for the concrete symptomizes the colonized’s interruption through shock. Again, Lyotard:

66   Navigations After the recent conflict, revolt is now cut off from its occasion and its source, cut off from the possible. This is certainly the most serious crisis in expression for some time: expression is no longer able to surpass its material, no longer knows how to assign a “beyond” to the event.… There is no longer any delirium that can live up to our tidy violence. Chance and arbitrariness have entered our everyday life along with horror, and often it is no longer desire that produces surreality, but remorse.55

Xvi Ontological defamiliarization Writing in that gap of perceptual shock, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon are embodied subjects interrupting emerging metropolitan spaces. Their writings document the force of their defamiliarization, as they analyze their ontological excursions into colonized subjectivity. Touch becomes a sublime convulsion marking their phenomenal limits. Césaire writes: And now I ask, what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilizations, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated “the root of diversity”… The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The Amer­ican hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.56 Embodiment brings no respite to Aimé Césaire’s sojourns in Paris. The ambivalence of modern subjectivity, with its racisms and its brutalities across the colonies, rears its head of accountability. An accountability that never gets articulated.

Xviii Tangled disposition Under the influence of the Dadaists and Surrealists, the notion of the avant-­garde expands beyond the painterly frame and the theatrical proscenium. It impinges upon the fascia of the daily, as Marcel Duchamp’s definition of art as something to “do” rather than “to make” emphasizes.57 Duchamp’s experiments with found and everyday objects such as the toilet bowl and the bicycle wheel redefine art as a practice of startling possibilities that disregard hierarchies, orthodoxies and hermetic categories. His emphasis on the conjuncture of the unexpected addresses the everyday as surreal, a site of an emancipatory engagement. Duchamp’s interest in the quotidian addresses the social as an aesthetic enactment. This particular strain of surrealism coheres around Bataille and the College of Sociology. It is indebted to Marcel Mauss for its attention to the social, and to Breton for its aesthetic preoccupations. But as method and social practice, it is indebted to the somatic space forged by Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon and other colonial subjects who pose urgent ruminations on the habitual. To grasp this segue, James Clifford’s interpretation of the term “surrealism” is helpful. Clifford’s indebtedness to Marcel Mauss and George Bataille

Contested visuality   67 c­ ondenses this intellectual tradition to an ongoing critical practice. He uses surrealism in a broad sense to envelop an aesthetic that includes “fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious.” For Clifford, surrealism is “a tangled disposition” whose overlapping boundaries of ethnography and surrealism produce a contested reality of past and future possibilities with which to be critically engaged.58 Clifford writes: After Europe’s collapse into barbarism and the manifest bankruptcy of the ideology of progress, after a deep fissure had opened between the experience of the trenches and the official language of heroism and victory … the world was permanently surrealist.59 Underscoring that surrealism is not a body of doctrines but an activity, Clifford establishes the materiality of the tactile as a defining tool of the everyday. In other words, surrealist social practice demands an embodied and total consideration of the impact of the sensory upon the lived. It also opens up the circuitry between the visual and the technological. The ideological dichotomies that create a neatly binary narrative of European modernity (civilized–savage, modern– primitive) are shattered when put into the context of emerging modernities located beyond the eye of the European imagination.60 When that which has been historically unavailable surfaces, discursive ruptures happen that are impossible to neatly locate in space and time.

Xviii Transcontinental sojourns Leopold Senghor’s poignant poems to the Senegalese shocktroops of battle who fought and died for France in World War II portrays this sense of groundlessness: There they lie stretched out by the captive roads along the routes of disaster Thin poplar trees, statues of dark gods draped with their Long, gold coats Senegalese prisoners lying gloomily on French soil61 Senghor’s physical groundedness allows for fragments and ruins of bodily crossings to surface with historic self-­reflexivity across the geopolitical landscape: the Senegalese fighting for the French in Europe during World War II; the French in Algeria; the British in India and East Africa; Africans in Paris and New York; African Amer­icans in Mexico City, Paris and Amsterdam; Indians in London, Paris, South Africa and Moscow. These transcontinental sojourns lead to transformations on either side of the concurrence. As Jean-­Paul Sartre emphasizes in his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth:

68   Navigations It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity.… A new generation came on the scene.… With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and … their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them.62 Sartre points out that colonial migrancy shifts avant-­garde conversations about transnational intersectionality away from the enclosed spaces of the café, the prison, the salon and the theater. Migrancy accosts the traveler with the uncontainability of the crowd, the unpredictability of the street, the delirium of colonial violence and the hybridity of global flows. Its startling contacts impact modern subjectivity. Across an uneven international colonized sphere that includes the whole of Africa, South Asia and Indochina (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma), a global avant-­garde transpires. Again, Fanon, reflecting on a poem by Keita Fodeba: There is not a single colonized person who will not receive the message that this poem holds. Naman, the hero of the battlefields of Europe, Naman who eternally ensures the power and perenniality of the mother country, Naman is machine-­gunned by the police force at the very moment that he comes back to the country of his birth: and this is Setif in 1945, this is Fort-­leFrance, this is Saigon, Dakar, and Lagos. All those niggers, all those wogs who fought to defend the liberty of France or for British civilization recognize themselves in this poem by Keita Fodeba.63 Fanon identifies the transnational subject “Naman” as the subaltern of the global historical frame, the unsung casualty of the imperial project. The formal innovations of Fodeba’s poetry recede in the face of the poem’s contextual breakthrough. Fodeba’s poetry highlights the impact of migrant bodies colliding in transnational locales. The colonized black subject is de-­ethnologized and made the agent of history, as engaged but historically disempowered citizen without a state. For Fanon, himself a subject of that interim space between subject of the colonial state and agent of subaltern history as member of the Algerian revolutionary guard, the FLN, the emergent figure of Naman, the new historical subject, is the way forward.

Xix Decolonial avant-­garde In the process of becoming the agent of history, Paul Robeson’s plea in 1949 for self-­determination during the World Peace Congress in Paris remains a particularly evocative instance of how this aesthetic avant-­garde shaped the political platform for change. Martin Duberman notes that W.E.B. Du Bois headed the Amer­ican delegation and Pablo Picasso and Louis Aragon were among the luminaries at the Congress. Robeson apparently sang to the gathering and spoke out for colonial peoples still denied their rights: “The wealth of America,” he began,

Contested visuality   69 had been built on the backs of the white workers from Europe … and on the backs of millions of blacks.… And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone.64 Robeson’s speech stands out as a memorable gesture that encapsulates modern avant bourgeoisification that characterized a considerable portion of Africa and Asia by the first half of the twentieth century. To be modern yet not free, to be individualistic yet denied the rights to citizenship, to be globally mobile yet not part of a definable social class—this was Robeson’s condition as much as it was that of other Third World subjects roaming Europe as exiles from the 1920s on. Claude McKay, Josephine Baker, Countee Cullen, Katharine Dunham, Suzanne Césaire, Mahatma Gandhi, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere—the list continues. Embedded within the narrative of the avant-­garde is its teleological limit. Discontinuous, but preoccupied with the new. Non-­linear, yet historically sequential: Antonin Artaud among the Tarahumara in Mexico. Georges Bataille’s interest in Islam and Tibetan Lamaism. Mahatma Gandhi in London and Durban. James Baldwin, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright in Paris. Peking Opera in Berlin and Balinese dancing in Paris. G. I. Gurdjieff in the Caucasus. Michel Foucault in Tunisia. Frantz Fanon in Marseille and Algiers. Michel Leiris in Dakar and Djibouti. Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil. Zora Neale Hurston and Katharine Dunham in Haiti. André Masson and Paul Rivet in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh in Paris, Moscow, and New York. These are the conjunctures that encapsulate the tremulous backdrop against which the interlocking experiences of modernity, globalization and the avant-­ garde have unfolded.65

Notes   1 Charles McKew Parr, Ferdinand Magellan, Circumnavigator (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1953).   2 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 212.   3 Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5.

70   Navigations   4 Assia Djebar, “Forbidden Sight, Interrupted Sound,” Discourse 8 (Winter 1986–1987): 39.   5 See Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” in English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995). Fusco interconnects performance, ethnography, and exhibiting.   6 Djebar, “Forbidden Sight,” 41.   7 Eric Hobsbawm, Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-­Century Avant-­Gardes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 7.   8 Hobsbawm, Behind the Times.   9 Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 145. 10 Marcel Mauss, Sociology et Anthropologie (Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1968), 364–386. 11 Mauss, Sociology et Anthropologie. See also Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of the emergence of technologies of the self within the Western philosophical tradition in Technologies of the Self, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 12 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1964), 14. 13 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9. 14 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 13. 15 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 18. 16 F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909” in The Documents of Twentieth-­Century Art, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: The Viking Press, 1970). See F.T. Marinetti’s fascination for machines and cars in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909. 17 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto,” 19. 18 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto,” 22. 19 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto,” 21. 20 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Socialism or Barbarism” in Political and Social Writings: Volume 1, 1946–1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 21 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 104. 22 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Lowe charts the political economies shaping notions of subaltern sovereignty and agency across the geographies of British imperialism, including China, India, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. Also see Michel Leiris, Nights as Day Days as Night (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961). Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Publisher, 2001). 23 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 24 Moten, In the Break, 235. 25 Moten, In the Break, 235. 26 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257–258. 27 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 257–258. 28 Francois Lyotard, Political Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953). 29 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedermann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 388. 30 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 23. 31 Aimé Césaire refers here to the colonial Martinique of his childhood. Born in Martinique, Césaire studied in Paris in the 1930s. He initiated the negritude movement

Contested visuality   71 along with Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas in Paris. Following Césaire’s footsteps, Frantz Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in France and later worked for the French in Algeria. He practiced psychiatry in Algeria, where he shifted sympathy from the French to the Algerians. 32 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 140. 33 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 389. 34 Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Preface” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 25. 35 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 13. 36 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 14. 37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 109. 38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 112. 39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 113. 40 Homi Bhabha, “Introduction” in Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, xii. 41 Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (New York: Verso, 1996). 42 Antonin Artaud, Watchfields and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, ed. and trans. C. Eshleman with B. Bador (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), 163–165. 43 Jean-­Francois Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern” in Hal Foster, The Anti-­Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 172. 44 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52–53. 45 Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Oxford: Routledge, 1995). 46 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” in Predicament of Culture (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988). 47 Roland Barthes, “Whose Theater? Whose Avant-­Garde?” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 69. 48 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 172, 173. 49 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems, trans. Joanna Richardson (New York: Penguin Press, 1975), 11. See also Frantz Fanon’s “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” in The Wretched of the Earth, for case studies exploring the psychopathologies of the everyday under colonial violence. 50 André Breton, “Freedom is a Vietnamese Word” in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 339–340. 51 Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-­Gardes (New York: Routledge, 2001), xix–xxiii. 52 James Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 127. In “Ethnographic Surrealism,” Clifford points out that not enough work has been done on the interconnections between avant­garde movements, the social sciences, and Third World modernisms. 53 Jean-­Francois Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Kevin Paul Geiman and Bill Readings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 24. 54 Lyotard, Political Writings, 87. 55 Lyotard, Political Writings, 87. 56 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 59. 57 Marcel Duchamp, BBC interview with Joan Bakewell, “Late Night Line Up” June 5, 1968. 58 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 118–119. 59 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 119. 60 Edward Said’s analysis on the structuring notions of Orientalism are critical to this literature. Also the seminal work of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Malek Alloula lay out the performative violence of the ethnographic gaze through which colonial desire operates. Fanon’s analysis of the nature of identification on the part of the

72   Navigations c­ olonized as well as the colonizer draws out the embedded and interconnected relationships between power and desire that shaped colonial crossings. Alloula and Memmi’s work, on the other hand, present the staged and theatricalized nature of colonial violence through which the modern imaginary is constituted. Touch manifests in this archive of colonial desire as the terrifying place of non-­language frozen in time as sanitized photographs of Europe’s elsewhere. 61 Leopold Sedar Senghor, Leopold Sedar Senghor: The Collected Poetry, trans. Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1998), 57. 62 Sartre, “Preface” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 9. 63 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 233. 64 Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 342. 65 Gina Ulysse, Because When God Is Too Busy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017). Ulysse’s screams and invocations in “The Passion In Auto-­Ethnography” stages this ethnographic catachresis effectively. See also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Lowe maps the political avant-­garde’s international crossings in her exhaustive documentation.

Bibliography Artaud, Antonin. Watchfields and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, edited and translated by C. Eshleman and B. Bador. Boston: Exact Change, 1995. Barthes, Roland. “Whose Theater? Whose Avant-­Garde?” In Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Bataille, Georges. The Tears of Eros. San Francisco: City Lights Publisher, 2001. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 2012. Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Poems, translated by Joanna Richardson. New York: Penguin Press, 1975. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedermann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Breton, André. “Freedom is a Vietnamese Word.” In What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978. Castoriadis, Cornelius. “Socialism or Barbarism.” In Political and Social Writings: Volume 1, 1946–1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Predicament of Culture. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Djebar, Assia. “Forbidden Sight, Interrupted Sound,” Discourse 8 (1986–1987). Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: New Press, 1989. Duchamp, Marcel. BBC interview with Joan Bakewell, “Late Night Line Up” June 5, 1968. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Contested visuality   73 Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Fusco, Coco. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance.” In English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: The New Press, 1995. Gordon, Lewis. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Oxford: Routledge, 1995. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-­Century Avant-­Gardes. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kostelanetz, Richard. Dictionary of the Avant-­Gardes. New York: Routledge, 2001. Leiris, Michel. Nights as Day Days as Night. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Lyotard, Francois. Political Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953. Lyotard, Jean-­Francois. “Defining the Postmodern.” In Hal Foster, The Anti-­Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-­Francois. Political Writings, translated by Kevin Paul Geiman and Bill Readings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Marinetti, F.T. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909.” In The Documents of Twentieth-­Century Art, edited by Umbro Apollonio. New York: The Viking Press, 1970. Mauss, Marcel. Sociology et Anthropologie. Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1968. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Parr, Charles McKew. Ferdinand Magellan, Circumnavigator. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1953. Richardson, Michael. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. New York: Verso, 1996. Senghor, Leopold Sedar. Leopold Sedar Senghor: The Collected Poetry, translated by Melvin Dixon. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1998. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited by Levine Donald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Part II

Periplus

5 Cochin, Dhow City

I City of Islands Hemmed in by stonewalls precise and systematic, made impressive by slough and slew, Cochin, a city of islands, recedes and rises like its waterline, on the Kerala coast of South India. The city undulates, ensconced between hulls of sisal and coir, etched with stone markings of former visitations—Chinese, Arab, African, Persian, the sounds of Portuguese, the signs of Hebrew. Displaced fantasies of Le Corbusier and Richard Meier now interrupt the transitioning skyline of low-­lying structures as glass and steel, concrete and plastic assert the arrogant prominence of a vertical imaginary—simulations of another Asian mega city framed by Dutch urban planning, a Manhattan in Malabar. Koji, Kochi, Cochim, Cochin—the city morphs memories, boundaries and genealogies, as gods seek refuge from empires, holy men embrace nirvana, pirates plunder for black gold and modern nomads embrace modernity’s democratic promises. This axis of medieval and enlightenment confrontations claims a standing still, a quiet place from which to ferment a future without blood, mortar, guns and ships, absent slaves and their curses. The ruins of older incursions hold ransom the storm beneath the calm: a solitary synagogue, a decaying Buddha, tormented St. Sebastian derelict and forgotten, posters of Lenin and Stalin, hammer-­and-sickle graffiti, rumors of hurried leavings and surreptitious beginnings. A central node of the maritime world of a bygone era, Cochin is a city perpetually reimagined. Its history is multiple, its journeys lead to a somewhere: inscriptions in a torah, a fourteenth-­century Portuguese statue of St. Sebastian, a Zanzibari cap, an Omani minaret, a Wendy’s pizza parlor, cyber cafés and high tech malls in cerulean blue and fuchsia. Now land-­bound, now ocean-­bound, now email-­bound, now cell-­phone-bound, it is a city of stormy contradictions. From Macao and Mombasa, Belem and Muscat they came with dreams and dervishes—Ibn Battuta and Vasco da Gama, Captain Kidd and Marco Polo—to invent a traveler’s city where Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews, Buddhists, Jains, Trotskyites and anarchists jostle a modernity sped fast in the fulcrum of maritime economies. Silk, cardamom, cloves and the treacherous pepper, that which bewitches time and intoxicates history, decay the waterline with colonial desire.

78   Periplus These days, a glittery spartanism grips Cochin in thrall as gold, diamonds, chiffon and technology evoke a fetish for the new. Consumption and the culture of obsolescence is seducing this Marxist city toward its uneasy identity as a transnational hub, with its speculative architecture, delectable bakeries, confectioners, designer shoe shops, art galleries, thriving tourist economy, tropical ecology, alternative health remedies, Ayurvedic massage centers and rich cultural traditions of dance, theater, music and martial arts. One enters the city as a fragment. Marxist. Mercantilist. Trader, tourist or traveler. Circling the city through cumulonimbus clouds, the eye catches glimpses of landscape: waterways, canals, islands, lakes, rivers, waterpools, slivers of isthmuses, an archipelago of lush swampland. Cochin is a mnemonic reminder of Manhattan before its verticality: Jew Street, Muslim Street, Broadway, Spice Street, Broad Street, Linden Street and Parsley Street. Its sixteenth-­ century claim to fame is its impressive natural harbor, one of the largest in the Asian maritime economy and worthy of Henry Hudson’s awe. The Malabar Coast is notoriously turbulent with no calm havens for travelers coming from Macao, the South China Seas, Batavia and Malacca through the Coromandel Coast around Cape Comorin. However, Cochin coheres in the medieval imagination as a haven of peace, a monsoon city of pagodas, minarets, domes and cupolas, spires, towers and modernist hopes, whose moldy roofs erode the dank of dark tales: fervent conversions, rapes of the pagan, concubinage without consequence. Embossed upon the city is the mystique of the Franciscans, the intensity of the Jesuits, the severity of the Syrians and the decadence of the Romans (who landed in Cranganore, referred to by Ptolemy and Pliny as Museri). Invoking Lusitania and Malabar, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, Soviet communism and Cuban socialism, Moscow and Mecca, mobile phones and outsourcing, Cochin is a mendicant city—a nerve of the world.

Ii Palimpsest imaginaries To live in Manhattan is to live through the memories of other port cities one has inhabited: Dar es Salaam, Cochin, Recife. Dutch urban planning, Portuguese architecture, indigenous storytelling: to write about Cochin is to write through the histories of Batavia, Macao, Hoi An, Aceh, Malacca, Aleppo, Manhattan. Like Los Angeles, Cochin is a series of urban centers linked through commerce. Like New York City, it is a conglomeration of islands, waterways, town and village systems of urban intensities linked through history, geology and imagination. Its physical geography invokes the structure of Amsterdam’s Harbor Islands. The Dutch built the Eastern Islands around the city of Amsterdam to expand their colonial port city infrastructure: Kattenburg, Wittenburg and Oostenburg (and recently, KNSM Eiland, Java Eiland, Borneo Eiland, Sporenburg). They mirror their creations in Cochin through their fascination with Vypin Island (Fort New Orange), Fort Cochin, Bolghatty Island and Vallarpadam. The Portuguese built fort cities of strategic significance, reproducing their penchant for geological liminalities of the Algarve: isthmus, jutting rocks, spectacular

Cochin, Dhow City   79 vistas of maritime reconnaissance grounded by churches of the Order of Santiago. The British steal with gunpowder and treachery to establish a mirror port to their other colonial outpost, New York. They build a Manhattan within Cochin and call it Willingdon Island. Cochin is unique and a replica, it is an Indian Ocean city awake across multiple temporal structures from the sixteenth and twenty-­first centuries, the maritime and aerospace economies of time and space. It is a microcosm of the first throes of globalization spanning the ninth-­century Buddhist migrations to Borobodhur, Angkor Wat and Ayuthaya, the thirteenth-­century trading economies of the Omanis, Africans and the Chinese, the pre-­Inquisition migration of the black Jews and the sixteenth-­century colonial conquests by the West. Today’s Cochin is many cities in one.1 Water defines its logic as the city finds itself at the liminal cross roads of three oceans: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Consequently, Cochin is both a commercial and a historic city, structured around a man-­made archipelago on the tempestuous Malabar Coast. Nodes of intensity structure its bridges, railway junctions, ferry jetties, port, trading villages and settler outposts of formerly Portuguese, Jewish, Dutch, British, Arab, Chinese, Yemeni, Syrian, African and more recently Tamil, Gujarathi, and Sindhi communities now incorporated into the larger Cochin imaginary. Departures, relocations and commutes mark daily life in Cochin, reiterating its nomadic structuring as a city of non-­linear and fractured urban imaginary, rather than a conventional urban core. Cochin is a composite of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Dar es Salaam, Muscat, Aden, Basra, Kuwait and New York, as migrants leave families behind in the city in states of unimaginable deferral. It is a euphemism for the quintessential contemporary condition of spatial dislocation emblematized by the Dar-­us-salaam Mosque. Its twin cities of Cochin and Ernakulam fragment the city’s imagination into historic and contemporary enclaves, a cartography that is elliptical and perambulatory rather than grid-­like. The areas of Mattanchery and Fort Cochin embody the medieval and colonial city, while Thopumpody functions as a distended mobile link between the old city of Fort Cochin, Willingdon Island and the strung-­out commercial port city of Ernakulam, whose own historicity has merged into the greater metropolitan area of the city of Cochin. The idea of Cochin is awash in movement. Its imagination is one of simultaneous habitation, multi-­sited between maritime-, air- and land-­bound imaginaries. Life in the city involves movement between islands, traversals across old and new landscapes between the past and the present, hard to see and deeply interwoven. A university lecturer takes a boat from Bolghatty Island across to the boat jetty, a bus to the train station at Ernakulam and then a train to Alleppey where she teaches, in the evening returning home by train, bus and boat. A doctor in Vypin takes the ferry to Fort Cochin and then a bus to work. A massage therapist takes the boat from Fort Cochin to the main Ernakulam boat jetty, then a bus from the jetty to the main bus depot in Quilon, where she works, and returns to Cochin via the same route at the weekend.

80   Periplus Almost every home in the city has a parent, child or extended relative in either Southeast Asia, the Middle East or Africa. In this state of deferral, all sensations are refracted by distance, where the loss of a loved one is mediated by the telephone, the hurried expensive flight back for a delayed burial and a hasty return to the grind of the living without time for grieving. Daily life for many in Cochin is a state of longing and nostalgia, as families live in the present awaiting the sporadic, infrequent and intermittent return of their loved ones. This is a narrative as old as the city itself. To live in Cochin is to live in an interrelated structure of urban linkages of local densities, regional intensities across the Malabar Coast, particularly from Cochin to Kollam (Quilon—a major port city during the thirteenth-­century global imaginary, now a quiet sea side town) and international labor flows. Old colonial spice routes collide with modern migrational itineraries to East Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, laborers, drivers, nurses, teachers and engineers represent a critical mass of the flexible migrant population, generating new relationships of habitation and immigration that are only tenuously located in the language of diaspora. These nomadic populations of single households with roots in urban Kerala activate deeply fracturing relationships to space, family and mobility. They dwell in little enclaves of masculinity or, more precariously, as women domestics, nurses and teachers in Dubai, Muscat, Bangkok and Dar es Salaam, while also inhabiting emotive spaces elsewhere in Kerala or in yet a third country, linked through familial kinship. These different conditions of somatic satisfaction experienced by migrant Cochin Malayalees open up the destabilizing space of contemporary Cochin, at once locatable within the boundaries of the city and displaced onto other national geographies such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Zaire and Uganda.

Iii Ecumenical moorings The stories that shape Cochin precede modern theorizations of globalization, where periodization narratives locate the escalation of globalization in the colonial and industrial periods embodied in modern forms of travel: the train, plane and automobile; speed and modern forms of capital. As an idea, Cochin begins in antiquity with the travels of the Romans to Cranganore, an hour north of Cochin. The material culture of the Malabar Coast is embedded with the silt of trans-­oceanic trade linking the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. In post-­independence India, Cochin persists as a provincial town with a small airport that could circuitously link Malayalees to the modern world of air travel to other Indian cities. It was a secondary gateway to international travel for all who lived north of the state capital of Tiruvanthapuram, or Trivandrum. Cochin encroaches on the periphery of the modern imaginary with a tantalizing past as a fulcrum for an earlier era of inter-­ continental conjunctures. Dining with my parents in Cochin with a sweeping vista of the Chinese fishing nets of Vembanad Lake is always a trans-­oceanic reminder of this repository of

Cochin, Dhow City   81 links between East Africa, South India, the Middle East and the South China Seas. Migrants of the 1950s to Tanzania and later to Qatar, from Cochin, our home vernacular is a multi-­lingual fabrication of Swahili, Malayalam, Arabic, Portuguese and English, capturing one detour in the tale of Malayalee modernity. This convoluted cartography is encapsulated by the aroma of fusing spices and crackling pots in anticipation of a maritime feast not fit for the faint of heart. Steaming fresh crabs caught by Chinese fishing nets, Kerala shrimp curry, fish curry cooked in an earthen pot and petite deep fried skeletal fish assault the senses. Beginning with the meticulous trip to the suk (market), in search of fresh samaki (fish), mchicha (spinach) and mchunga (orange), the intense activity of frying, boiling and sautéing on the jiko (stove) in sufurias (pots) of various hierarchies of contamination for the alchemical processes at hand, the event of dinner is always the culmination of a culinary excess that invokes Dar es Salaam, Cochin and Doha simultaneously. From the raw to the cooked, food traditions at home span the Muslim ceremonial slaughtering of a goat on the festival of Eid, learned from Kiguyu friends in Tanzania. Freshly salting goat’s blood and the elaborate task of de-­feathering a chicken are performed with the precision of a theatrical performance. Specialties like ugalli and irio, maandazi and mishkaki, are served alongside delectable Kerala vegetable curries like the aviall and thoren. Middle Eastern delicacies such as dates and figs make for an evocative denouement of memory invoking former lives in desert climes. It is the frugal rice gruel, the congee, my mother’s favorite comfort food, that most dramatically underscores trans-­oceanic contact in the culture of dailies. A rice soup whose lengthy simmering time creates the cloudy, comforting base of the peasant meal, the congee has multiple homes with roots in pre-­colonial trading contact. The trans-­local lineage of the rice gruel trail invokes shores beyond that of Dar es Salaam and Cochin, extending all the way from Bangkok and Hoi An, to Ch’uanchou.2 The congee offers a material map of a prior moment of trans-­oceanic contact. Relegated traditionally to the category of what K.N. Chaudhuri delineates as “famine food”3 and associated with domestic workers, the poor, the ill and the young, the congee is frequently consumed as comfort food on monsoon days. It has more recently made it to the bourgeois table as a health food in a variety of mix and match of barely, millet, oats and rye. Today, congee is served as peasant gruel in China and India; as a breakfast meal in Thailand, with pork, scallions, condiments and vegetables; as a soup for all seasons in Vietnam with seasoned meats or fish of your choice, or as a sweet, black glutinous porridge. It is a liquid reminder of older trading histories between the Champa in Vietnam, the Cholas in southern India, the Khmers in Angkor, the Thai and the Chinese.4 From its role as frugal satiator of hunger to its importance as a restorative porridge for the body’s maladies, the congee traces a path of incorporation from the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits and Gulf of Thailand onto the Mekong Delta and beyond the South China Seas.5 Contemporary identities of Cochin are linked to the transport-­networked practices of how people live the everyday: boat systems, railway networks, telecommunications matrixes, bus routes, familial inter-­city connections, televised

82   Periplus phantasmatics and mnemonic routes. Cochin is a liminal end-­nerve in the contemporary global economy and a centripetal catalyst from an earlier globalization of the thirteenth century. Its peculiar culture of a fully literate populace with a strong communist sensibility has created a stagnant domestic economy. Rather than work for a pittance in Kerala, people are willing to work with no rights or dignities in authoritarian regimes in the Middle East for what they consider decent pay. Contradicting life styles of hardcore communist mentalities, entirely outmoded in the rest of the world with its globalizing lifestyles of consumption, is transforming the Malabar’s fragile ecosystem. The Malabar continues to straddle multiple worlds as fresh images of V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Che Guevara continue to adorn market places and tea shops, even as unregulated overbuilding of mega-­high-rises inundate the rapidly deteriorating coastal ecology. Cochin appears to live in the here and now of speculative real estate expansion and massive corruption around land use. Issues of implementing existing environmental protection laws, transparency on the issues of water politics and the questions raised by the aggressive infrastructural development that is shortchanging environmental long term thinking for the political gains of the immediate future, are some of the real questions plaguing this archipelago at a nerve of the world. Coastal Malabar life coalesces around now drying Gulf money, African sojourns, Malaysian tourist jaunts, Thai education, Kuwaiti commercialism, Muscat banking, foreign tourism of Kerala cultures and traces of the historic past.

Notes 1 See Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Ashis Nandy, “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin” in Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). Both Ghosh and Nandy situate the city of Cochin in its oceanic context rather than within the national imaginary of a terrestrial, Subcontinental framework. 2 Janet Abu-­Lughod, “All the Silks of China” in Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 336. According to Abu-­Lughod, by the time of the Southern Sung (960 until 1234 in the north, continuing to 1276 in the south), and later the Yuan (1276–1368), the port cities of Hangchow (Kinsai), the capital city of the Southern Sung and considered the world’s largest city, and Ch’uanchou (in Fukien) were China’s most prominent seaports. They outstripped Canton. Ch’uanchou was cited by Ibn Battuta (1929 trans.: 293–297) to be the greatest port in the world “the largest (city) on the face of the earth.” 3 K.N. Chaudhuri, “Food and Cuisine” in Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169. 4 Janet Abu-­Lughod, “All the Silks of China” in Before European Hegemony, 339. 5 Gail Duffy, “Congee” in Vegetarian Cooking (Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1986) 126–127; Nghe Thuat Nau An Trung Hoa, “Sweet Black Glutinous Rice Congee” in New Family Recipes for Dinner Party (Tam Ngu: Hoa-­Viet-Anh, 1995), 89.

Cochin, Dhow City   83

Bibliography Chaudhuri, K.N. “Food and Cuisine.” In Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Duffy, Gail. “Congee.” In Vegetarian Cooking. Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1986. Ghosh, Amitav. In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. New York: Vintage, 1994. Lughod, Janet Abu.“All the Silks of China.” In Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Nandy, Ashis. “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin.” In Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. Tiec, Mon An Yen. “Sweet Black Glutinous Rice Congee.” In Nghe Thuat Nau An Trung Hoa – New Family Recipes for Dinner Party. Tam Ngu: Hoa-­Viet-Anh, 1995. Ulysse, Gina. Because When God Is Too Busy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

6 Dar es Salaam, socialist utopia

It is 1974, and my family is spending the day in Bagamoyo, a sleepy coastal Tanzanian village at the time. It is a historic place that shaped heart-­rending narratives in our history books at school in Dar es Salaam about the extreme brutality of Portuguese slavery. We kids in primary school could not visualize the horror that tormented the languorous Swahili coast we called home. Now at Bagamoyo, a terrifying unease I can still feel years later grips me as I wander through the mythic, desolate town with my mother. Bagamoyo literally means “lay your heart to rest”—a cryptic warning to the unfortunate people whose lives were forever destroyed by slavery. To the thousands of porters who wandered through this “end of the journey” town by the sea, after carrying brutal amounts of cargo on their shoulders for weeks, it is a welcome respite. Bagamoyo, a peripheral coastal village in the early 1970s, boasted a spectacular unspoiled beachfront. Its ambience is deceptively placid. Bagamoyo’s violent past, however, is etched on its somnambulistic landscape. Ruins of Portuguese slave fort design, Omani details, Afro-­Arab residential architecture and Indian arabesque facades connect the medieval Swahili town to Lisbon, Sanaa and Calicut. It is the lesser-­known Arab docking ground in the elaborate slave trade leaving East Africa via Zanzibar for Persia, Arabia, India, Mauritius and Mozambique. An old mosque in town and the old slave-­holding piers with pockmarks in the concrete offer reminders of a different era of human trade. Late eighteenth-­century shipments of human cargo to Zanzibar for the New World colonies and the Caribbean. Comings and goings between Oman, Malabar and East Africa involving spice, slaves and silks. Richard Burton, John Speke and Henry Stanley, all setting out in search of the source of the Nile, from Bagamoyo, the gateway to the Indian Ocean. In the 1970s, the decaying site was strangely vacant of commemoration or acknowledgment. Its stark silence a reminder of the ghosts of history. The heat of the afternoon sun leaves one thirsty by the sandy shore. There is no shelter around the slave pen. Even the trees fear the place, wrought by its heinous past.

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   85

Diasporic affect Diasporic affect coalesces out of the appulse of landscape, political upheavals, migration, displacement and the psychological ramifications of loss. Tactile shock is one technique of diasporic affect whose implications for visual and sensorial modalities are far reaching. The affective realm of tactile shock is located in cognitive ontologies. Associations triggered in the neurological space between cognitive mapping and haptic sensation evoke startling juxtapositions. Flashbacks, experiential submission in sites of historic trauma, accidental assignation with spaces that evoke repressed memories, all bear forms of tactile shock. For many diasporic subjects, the sea, the ship, the boat, the ocean, the sea log, become vehicles of tactile shock, allowing modes of inquiry to surface that otherwise lie buried in the residues of the past or the inarticulable. The activating mechanism of the ocean is one located in navigational logics, maritime histories and the legacies of slavery and conquest. The challenges of a decolonial reading lie in how these erased experiences transpose against the archived coherence of the written and the cataloged. Growing up in Tanzania during the first years of decolonization, the question of affect was insurmountable. There was no language of psychoanalysis available to access the melancholia, the violence, the disruption, the loss and the utopic energies propelling the young postcolonial state; yet, affect was the largest political tool available to the early postcolonial state to mobilize its deeply impoverished populace to action and empowerment. Tactile affect was also a visceral sensation embossed on the streets, the monuments, the emerging modernity of the streets, schools, public parks and playgrounds of the new nation-­state. The debilitation of colonialism whose openly racist and segregationist effects still lingered during the years of my child hood transformed into amorphous affects with the passage of time. One such inchoate affect lay in the early immersion with the violent history of the East African coast and its material neglect. In the 1960s, the physical remnants of German and Portuguese colonial architecture with British colonial details generated a deep melancholia in Dar es Salaam, the Indian Ocean town I had grown up in. Dar es Salaam used to be a quaint utopian city by the sea, embracing modernity in all its optimism. The public sphere was about Africanization, modernization, development. The unspeakable past of slavery and colonial servitude was the ghost in the project of national formation. Attention was on the modern nation-­state, not on a nostalgic and mournful preoccupation with the materialities of the historic past, still alive amidst the environmental detritus. Walking amidst the tactile ruins of the past at Bagamoyo evoked contradictory powerful emotions amidst the desolate, poverty stricken village. The enthusiasm of the young socialist state was repressing a persistent and deep affective imprint: the somatic and tactile affect that colonization’s brutality had left embossed on the coastal landscape. At Bagamoyo, something about that harsh place demanded a Benjaminian angel with head turned aghast at the horror unleashed, to fall from grace in accountability. The signs of western rationality

86   Periplus strewn across the medieval slave town untouched by centuries in 1972 gnawed at my senses. It was a moment of tangible affectivity encapsulating a dawning realization of the brutality of European colonization. Thick metal pylons atop massive concrete pillars with giant chains still attached. Well constructed stone remnants of the slave market that had survived well into the 1970s. No one had bothered to cut the metal chains out—they were too thick and large to do so. The mottled floor with the large green snake gliding across its chalky white cool surface leaves an indelible memory of fear. This was the story of the Swahili coast in all its rawness that the national project of state socialism had no time for. The hard physicality of Bagamoyo in the shadowless noon sun evoked an incomprehensible convulsion in my sensibility. Reading Theodore Adorno and Aimé Césaire, I grasp that convulsion now amidst these pages as an Indian Ocean affect. The ripples of epistemological violence that the decolonial era encompassed without the veneer of civility to mask it, here by the deserted beaches of Dar es Salaam and the East African coast. The elegance of the muezzin’s call to prayer offered solace as we walked away shaken by the serene beauty of the steady roll of the waves of the Indian Ocean. Arusha Declaration Flashback. October 14, 1999. New York City. Julius Nyerere, the former head of state of Tanzania has just passed away. Riding on the 14A train in Union Square, New York, I am thrown back to another time. It is 1967, in Mnazi Mmoja Park, Dar es Salaam. I imagine my mother, a Quilon born immigrant school teacher of physical education in Dar es Salaam at the time, partaking in the festive feeling of social transformation that is tangible in the air. Perhaps she buys an aromatic cup of kahawa from the mendicant kahawa seller, as she wanders through the lively, overflowing park. The areas fringing the park brim with anticipation as the people of Dar es Salaam throng Lumumba Street, Sokoine Drive and Independence Avenue to listen to Julius Nyerere announce the Arusha Declaration. Nervous but excited, she listens in expectation alongside others. As I sit at the window in our cold flat overlooking Mnazi Mmoja Park—the reek of gasoline from the Esso gas station below wafting up, little do I know that the stagings of revolution are unfolding before my very eyes. Tanganyika, December 9, 1961 Era of manifestos, protests and experiments in social organization. An experimental laboratory for sustainable African modernity. Tanzania, February 5, 1967. The Arusha Declaration, party document of TANU, presents a utopic and locally derived blueprint for a human scale social revolution. Proclaiming freedom, unity and socialism, it articulates a historically new formula for social change and utopic physicality within the postcolonial state. Announcing new measures for public ownership, rights to individual freedom and a series of deliberately socialist policy initiatives in the interest of the national public good, it explicitly redresses the fundamental rights to sovereignty and citizenship denied indigenous peoples under the colonial state. It

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   87 addresses economic frugality and the struggle to articulate a sustainable program for modernization. It promises individual freedoms while keeping sight of the need to create a sense of civic commitment in the name of the common good. It is critical to the articulation of the new mode of socialist physicality.1 The experiment lasted from 1967 to 1977. And as a model for democratic progress, it failed. While the promise of egality and freedom offered a new ideology of modernness from that of colonial subjugation, the material relations of people to available freedoms of individual, social and public possibilities were never to be fully realized. The Declaration states: Loans are better than “free gifts.” Techniques of self-­reliance counters the pernicious baggage of economic gift giving … One condition of a loan is that you show how you are going to repay it. This means you have to show that you intend to use the loan profitably and will therefore be able to repay it. But even loans have their limitations.2 The Declaration proposes that negotiating the modes and means of economic transacting is one of the fundamental aspects for the possibility of individual freedoms. Such economic relationships are intertwined with psychic, social and legal capacities, as much as they are determined by global flows of capital. Without control over the means and modes of exchange, there can be no control over individual or territorial freedoms: How can we depend upon gifts, loans and investments from foreign countries and foreign companies without endangering our independence? The English people have a proverb which says: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” How can we depend upon foreign governments and companies for the major part of our development without giving to those governments and countries a great part of our freedom to act as we please? … dependence upon others would endanger our independence and our ability to choose our own political policies.3 Individual freedom, state sovereignty and economic independence are theorized as interlocking experiences in the Declaration, thereby laying the ground for the argument that individual freedoms are available to the extent that they are always experienced and expressed in relation to the common socialist good—where frugality and freedom converge. Active measures were implemented at local levels to train the nation’s youth in the proposed new techniques of economic emancipation. The idea of public good during the early years of socialist policy making are harnessed to cultural nationalism. Banks and businesses are nationalized alongside the more visible public ownership of land and the invention of new public spaces through parades, flag waving and public spectacles of dance or Ngoma. These fabricated arenas of physicality and movement carved out a sphere of authenticating socialist citizenship that was distinctly Africanist in its markings.

88   Periplus This was the beginning of the discourse of “The Authentic Socialist.” But the heterogeneous populace of Tanzania has complex associations with this overarching rhetoric of socialist citizenship. They remember the Zanzibar uprisings and revolution of 1964. They remember the massacre of Arabs in Zanzibar. Simultaneously, education and youth training becomes instrumental to the implementation of socialist change across the state, and the city of Dar es Salaam is engaged with social activities that affirm its utopian potential.4 Public staging of national dance troupes. Militaristic drills of the national service. Secondary school children synchronized in group exercise routines. Albeit in a more relaxed fashion, the Tanzanian experiments followed the Soviet, Chinese and Eastern European attempts to regiment human social actions. The state tried to develop worker athletes to embed ideology into the youth of the state. Physical education, the modernist base for the training of healthy bodies and good citizens, informed the disciplining impetus of public education and P.E. instructors were desired commodities in Dar es Salaam high schools. The resounding call for a socialist physical culture generated local expressions of proletarian group movements: ngomas, marches, drills and the national service.5 To really perform state ideology, it is important to be able to synchronize movement within a larger physical ensemble of moving bodies: calisthenics, group exercises, large-­scale drills with clubs and flags. These are enactments of public confidence that generate a visual semantics of national participation and strength en masse.6 This emphasis on synchronization only heightened the deep resistance on the part of urban youth to be dehumanized as socialist cadres. We opposed statist forms of corporeal regulation. We practice vagrancy, disinterest, skepticism, boredom and truancy. We generate multiple meanings around the socially produced body of the state. We negotiate the monotony and regimentation of schooling through an elaborate mechanism of interruption. Disassociation from the coercive regiment of the group. Disruption of the iron hand of the state through indiscipline. Disaffiliation from the easy cohesiveness rendered physical through the staging of moving bodies for public display. Chewing gum, sloppiness, skipping classes. Hooliganism, hanging out. Variously called “youth delinquency,” “deviancy,” or “vagrancy.” This is the junction between education, physical movement and dissent. It is the improvised aftershock of the ujamaa experiment. Perhaps this sounds familiar. After all, during this same period there are the radical protests in Paris in 1968; the Roundhouse conference in London with Stokley Carmichael and Angela Davis in London, 1967; the anti-­war protests in the United States; and the civil rights struggles in the United States that simultaneously argued for the rights to vote in 1964 while also staging a loss of faith in the state. In these historically older and well established states, social revolutions are forums for the expression of individual freedoms and the right to dissent against the state. But in Tanzania, the nation-­state is being invented even as the idea of the state is being called into question. It is anti-­statist before it is a state with sovereignty.

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   89 This is one of the tragic contradictions that has haunted the laboratories, and the attendant selves and bodies, of postcolonial statehood. Because of this contradiction, resistance in Tanzania ultimately took on very different forms than in the much more public areas of protest and civil disobedience that marks the late 1960s. Our revolt is in the form of honoring the spheres of the self for which socialist policies could not account. They tried to suppress and control the sentient boundaries of our corporeal self-­invention: No Western imports. No driving on Sunday afternoons. No high-­school uniform skirts more than three inches above the knees. We interiorized our corporal freedoms into the private spaces of cars, living rooms, hotels, clubs, churches and civic organizations such as the Sai Baba foundation in Dar es Salaam, the Goan Institute, the Khalsa club, the Aga Khan’s Jamat-­Khana and the YMCA. These forums allowed for a wide array of cultural activities that were produced outside the purview of the state.7 Tale of two Yenans The Kerala Kalamandalam of Dar es Salaam was one such cultural organization geared toward consciously creating community and maintaining cultural connections with South India. The organization laboriously promoted the study of the Kerala language, Malayalam, and offered classes in cultural forms such as folk dancing and kalaripayyati along with musical instruction in Karnatic vocal training. These trainings occurred in fragmented, informal domestic settings: on terraces, living rooms and verandahs. The emphasis on sustained and rigorous training was an atavistic myth reminiscent of sojourner parents’ nostalgia for their traditions, especially those that did not translate across the kala pani (the Black Water, a euphemism for the Indian Ocean). The idea that one has to have had six years of training in Bharatanatyam, following which one has an arangetram (official initiation into the profession of dance) was never part of the narrative of learning in a culture where the ad hoc, informal and forced dissemination of cultural knowledge is the norm. And yet, there is an interesting blending of the interlocking migrant histories of Kerala culture and Tanzanian socialism. Amateur theater groups performed plays that addressed land reforms and the redistribution of wealth in a radically transformed system of caste and class. These productions were sympathetically in sync with similar themes about land-­reform measures and the redistribution of resources in Tanzania in the post-­independence phase. Kerala Kalamandalam productions such as Chatakari (Anglo-­Indian), Chemeen (Fishes) and Nhingal ene communist aki (You Made Me a Communist) addressing political and social changes in Kerala, along with the mythological stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were performed at the Diamond Jubilee Hall to great public interest in the spectacle of amateur theater. These cultural productions were realized under new historical conditions of migrancy, transitional belonging and a newly politicized sense of self and community for dispersed Indian communities, who, through forms of civic organizing, articulated themselves as diaspora at this time.

90   Periplus The intellectual history of the two utopian projects—Kerala communism and Tanzanian socialism—both respectively describe themselves as Yenan-­style experiments in utopian social experimentation. This intertwined connection between Tanzania and India can be encapsulated in the tale of two Yenans. For both Tanzanian and Kerala forms of social change, Maoist strategies in the Yenan province of China provided the human laboratory for thinking through a framework for an agrarian based experiment in sustainable modernity. This mode of social change involved a radicalization of the countryside into modes of self-­reliance and collectivization that privileged the workers and peasants over writers and artists—its intent was to blur the distinction between intellectuals and peasants through the glorification of the agrarian base of the state as a newly conscious proletariat. While the reality of these Yenan experiments in China resulted in the loss of freedoms, purges of the intelligentsia and aggressive redistribution of peoples within the region, this model of socialist transformation had deep implications for the role of culture as the psychic arbiter of the state. The Yenan experiment provided a crucial laboratory for formulating socialist pedagogy in Tanzania and Kerala, India. By 1967, Kerala communism, drawing from the Maoist theories of agrarian revolution, had established a Maoist wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI­M). Julius Nyerere had embarked on a series of land-­reform measures drawing largely from indigenous traditions of shared communal ownership but linked with the more large-­scale mobilization of the Yenan reforms in China initiated by Mao. His “Arusha Declaration” was inspired by his watershed visit with Chou en Lai in China (1965); and in it he cited older historic links.8,9 The nationalization measures to reallocate land and property in rural and urban areas in Tanzania had serious implications for Tanzanian Asians whose political positioning in Tanzania had always been precarious—a result of their largely complicit relationship with the British under colonialism. While there were many progressive and radical voices within the Tanzanian Asian community, the majority of Asians were disengaged presences with largely mercantile interests in the state. They owned considerable amounts of property in key urban areas such as Dar es Salaam and Morogoro. With such a fraught history of Asian interaction in Tanzania, the propelling ideology of peasant mobilization catalyzed an anathema for the urban, the foreign, and particularly, the non-­ African within Tanzania’s polity. These reactions were exacerbated by the entrenched racisms and insular relationships of the Asian communities toward Tanzanians. With radical measures to decolonize the state, the challenge for the comprador Asian classes in postcolonial Tanzania to counter their own prejudices and sojourner mentalities was heightened under the new policies of nationalization. The implementations of Swahili as the primary means of education generated new spaces of negotiation and assimilation for Asian youth. The yenanization of Tanzania ironically opened up avenues for Tanzanian Asian youth in public schools to assimilate in ways that previous generations had not been able to.10

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   91 In the maelstrom of groundbreaking changes transforming the state, the production of Malayalee plays by petit bourgeois Indian immigrants to Dar es Salaam created a new material link. They generated a political bridge between the different kinds of political consciousness that shaped immigrant Asian bourgeois subjectivity in Tanzania. At once Marxist and capitalist, radical and conservative, tradition bound but already fragmented in their experience of the world through colonialism, postcolonialism and the great migrations to Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, these new historical subjects would shape new lines of affiliation across caste and class belonging in ways not possible in the early India of the decolonizing first decade from 1947–1957. Viewed at once as an extension of the colonial presence in the decolonizing postcolonial African state, Indian migrants from the Kerala province of India working in Tanzania at this time straddled a particularly unique set of political ideologies that linked with the nature of social change taking place in their new country of domicile, Tanzania. The irony of this history is that the formerly dispossessed, largely agrarian peoples of the Kerala provinces who left India because of poverty and extreme disempowerment through the tyranny of the feudal class structures impeding social progress, now found themselves in positions of oppressive relations with local peoples historically dispossessed and exploited by the local Asian and European presence. This delicate shift in power, authority and agency produced new relations of inter-­racial and inter-­class/caste dislocations for Indian immigrants in the new state of arrival. The formation of Tanzania was based on the privileging of a secular constitution and a socialist philosophy in a country where the customs of both indigenous and Islamic peoples are an evolving logic. Early Tanzanian socialist experiments were a particular merging of non-­sectarian socialist gestures with the practices of daily life influenced to different degrees by the rules of customary practice. Because the Swahili culture of Tanzania is predominantly Muslim, the socialist revolution of the 1960s was a unique crucible for the cultivation of modern egalitarianism and its historical transformation of the global mythic—from the larger-­than-life enactments of tragic possibilities, to the habitations of everyday life filled with the prohibitions and taboos of social inequities. Hadith as Indian Ocean aesthetics One influence in the cultural gestures of Tanzanians is the hadith, the records of the sayings and doings of the Prophet. Hadiths are oral and written accounts of the Prophet’s lived observations as recounted by his Companions and described by the intimate associate of the Prophet, the translator of al-­Bukhari, Muhammad Asad, who shared his daily life. They are a transmitted knowledge of dailiness that open up the path (Sunnah) to be followed. The hadith offers a wealth of information on the structuring codes of everyday life. Filtered through the sayings of the Prophet to his devout Companions, these codes shape the lived practices of daily life in Muslim societies. This path constitutes customary and

92   Periplus juridical hadiths (Fiqh) that are part of the larger ethical code of Islamic Law or Sharia, based on the Qur’an. Sharia informs the religious and secular realms of Muslim daily life. These codifications and laws of habit are numerous with nuanced interpretations and translations around which diverse traditions of Islam have unfolded. For example, the hadith against idolatry (Shirk) is a fundamental assumption against anthropomorphism and a visual representation of the human face as an expression of the divine. This tension around anthropomorphic representation shifts the codes and expressions of envy onto other terrains of representation, particularly impacting daily life in cultures where Islam has infiltrated, especially Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. There are codes that govern the cooking of food and manner of dress; there are purification rituals and codes of conduct that govern behaviors in the home, during prayers and in public life. Codes of business, codes of hospitality, codes of fasting. Codes of sumptuary display, codes of address that deflect arrogance. All these codes become elaborately controlled spheres that shape the cultivation and management of the self against the forbidden, or haram. In this elaborately codified realm of the daily, envy is a larger social mechanism that is codified within the boundaries and limits of sociality. It is contained within the prohibition (haram) of evil and vain discourse (laghw). What results is an abhorrence of ostentatious conduct that effectively deflects the anxiety of inciting envy, and its seductive twin, desire. In the text of al-­Bukhari jealousy erupts when the Prophet’s second wife, A’ishah, glorifies the one she envies: Sa’id ibn ‘Ufayr related to us: Al-­Layth related to us, saying: Hisham wrote to me, on the authority of his father [‘Urwah], on the authority of ‘A’ishah, who said: Never was I so jealous of any wife of the Prophet as I was jealous of Khadijah—[although] she died before he wedded me—: for often I heard him praise her; and God had bidden him to give her the glad tidings of a palace of jewels [which she would have in Paradise]; and whenever he killed a sheep, he would present a good deal of it to her friends.11 In yet another translation of this text (which has many different transmitters): Umar ibn Muhammad ibn Hasan related to me: My father related to us: Hafs related to us, on the authority of Hisham, on the authority of his father [‘Urwah]. On the authority of ‘A’ishah, who said: Never was I so jealous of any of the Prophet’s wives as I was jealous of Khadijah, though I had never seen her; but the Prophet very often praised her. And often he would kill a sheep and cut it into pieces and send them to Khadijah’s friends. And often I would say unto him: It is as though there was none in this world but Khadijah!—And he would answer me: Behold, she was this and was that, and I had children by her.12 The Sahih of al-­Bukhari suggests that the codes of envy in the ninth century functioned within specific cosmological configuration: the Persian imagination,

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   93 war, displacements and interchanges with other cultures. The dispersal of cultural codes through migration, diaspora and modern nation-­state formations generates a fractured and contemporary return to earlier codifications of envy: the haram (prohibitions) contained within the hadith. And yet, in spite of the deeply programmed cultural aversion to envy, there is one form of it that has evaded codes and continues to thrive. In all of the Indian Ocean cultures of East Africa and South Asia where there is a peculiar merging of Muslim, Christian, Jain, Sikh, Hindu and indigenous practices, along with the earlier influences of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, these codes function as a counter-­cultural undertow that preserves class and culture. In Tanzania circa the 1960s, the daily habits of fasting and purification practiced by Swahili communities coexisted with the secular modernism of socialist nation building. While ethnic identifications were formally erased in the interest of the unified nationalist self, under socialism, identifications had to be covertly preserved at the level of daily practices—the rituals of prayer, the breaking of bread at sun down. The dress codes and the headcover, or burqa, effectively distinguished communities from each other. In Muslim schools, the socialist anthem of “Mungu Ibariki Africa” was recited alongside the holy prayer “Bismillahi Ramani Rahim” (In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful). In the madrasa or classroom of the Jesuit convent school, non-­Muslim students grasped very early on the concept of haram, “that which is forbidden.” They learned not to eat in public during Ramadan in respect of their classmates. Forms of respectful address, particularly phrases such as “Salam Mwaleikum” (Peace be with you), “Mwaleikum Salam” (with you as well) and “Insha’Allah” (God willing), became common parlance, just as the public ritual of Friday prayer, or Jumuah, mediated the boundaries of sociality. A social practice shared by all children regardless of creed or nationalist leanings. African Asians “Malaika, Nakupenda Malaika.” At a teen music fest in Bangalore, India, during the mid-­1970s, I croon at the microphone in Swahili.13 It is the era of surveillance and nervous fatigue, triggered by Indira Gandhi’s emergency measures. Wearing a kitenge shirt, platform shoes and thirty-­inch flares, I simulate the sonorous haunting voice of Miriam Makeba as a way out of the asphyxiating sense of fear that grips Bangalore, India under the state of emergency. The mellifluous name “Malaika,” (kiswhahili for angel) invokes Miriam Makeba, the formerly exiled South African singer popularly known as the “soul of Africa.” A hot commodity in Bangalore, her music was a free gift for the imagination. Children were named “Malaika,” and so were homes. My parents named their Bangalore home Malaika; their friends gave their homes other Swahili names such as Jambo, Karibu, Furaha and Jamburi. As peoples’ dwellings created visual markers of the Afro-­Asian convergence, these names began to sprout up around the emerging localities of Indiranagar, Victoria Layout and Ulsoor.14

94   Periplus Indians returning from East Africa marked the spaces of Bangalore with traces of Africa. Khangas and kitenges adorned homes and bodies as curtains, tablecloths, bedspreads, dresses and wall hangings. The kitenge shirt, often with a “made in Pakistan” label, was a popular marker of belonging for teens such as myself and for those who recognized it. Makonde carvings occupied prominent places in peoples’ living rooms, often in the kitsch representation of Maasai warriors and the popular mother and child theme. Cherished possessions such as ivory walking sticks, drums, Maasai jewelry, elephant bangles and leopard-­skin handbags marked the African returned Indian. Swahili could be heard in stores owned by formerly East African entrepreneurs now settled in Bangalore. The odd use of popular Swahili words created invisible markers for immigrants from Africa to India. African and Africa-­returned students in Bangalore schools introduced Ngoma drums as a high-­school recreational option. The Kiguyu custom of slaughtering the goat was practiced by my family as a ceremonial marker of passage from Africa to India. Afro-­nostalgia met Indo-­African chic.15 And yet, a nationalist insularity within late 1970s Indian popular discourse— along with a conflicted obsession with anything from the West—made a historical and political understanding of the full implications of Afro-­Arab-Asian contact a deeply fraught cultural dilemma at both a local and an urban level. Even during the 1980s there was little room in the nationalist discourse of the Indian intelligentsia for African Asians to discuss the politics of black subjectivity within racist Indian discursive frameworks. Indian youth remained remarkably insular and ignorant about Africa and Africans. As students attending university in a culturally conservative era, Africans in Bangalore and Madras lived in considerable isolation from the general Indian milieu. There was a great disjunction between the material contact of Afro-­Arab-Asian culture and the ­linguistic space to articulate a politics of Afro-­Asian subjectivity outside the ­visceral yet inarticulate spaces of style, dwelling and everyday practices. I Trans-­Islamic routes In the spring of 2001, Afro-­Arab-Asian connections to Manhattan exploded in a dramatic way. The East coast of Africa became linked to New York City through discursive narratives of security and shock. Suspects involved in the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were being held in downtown Manhattan for their trial at City Hall. The startling connections between the World Trade Center bombings in New York City and the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, East Africa—both orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden—shrank the enormous distances between the two localities into one violent imaginary of a threatened United States sovereignty. US geo-­politics once again became connected to Dar es Salaam, and once again surfaced the security anxieties of the Cold War—a time when the East coast of Africa was a defense interest with Soviet, Chinese and Cuban connections. Intrigue. Collaboration. Trans-­Islamic routes. The Indian Ocean figured prominently in the imaginative space of terror as speculations about Osama Bin

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   95 Laden’s current residence in Afghanistan with the Taliban became connected to Islamic connections in East Africa and New York. The maps of intrigue and sabotage invoked older routes between the Gulf of Kutch, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. It is a profoundly resonant map with maritime and colonial histories of intrigue, capture, slavery and imperial conquest. In the sixteenth-­century map of the world, the haven of peace looms as a harbor from the storm. In the late twentieth century, this same haven of peace, Dar es Salaam, is irrevocably marred as a terrorist site. It is a place that figures only as a point of security interest to the United States, and not as a great composite of the converging currents of culture, history and migrations of the Indian Ocean. Like its sister cities of Zanzibar, Mombasa, Pemba and Kilwa, Dar es Salaam is a profoundly syncretic Muslim city. It is the city that shaped its own  raison d’etre in opposition to what Julius Nyerere called “the Manhattan way of life.” Ii Swahili memories and a cup of tea The predominance of the Gujarati trader communities along the East African coast had made South Asian mercantile culture a dominant presence on the Swahili coast for centuries. And yet, the diversity of the South Asian migrations to East Africa was reduced to the derogatory term “banyani,” meaning Asian, with negative connotations of usury. The monolithic image of referring to everyone of South Asian descent in Tanzania as “banyani” generated an unspoken tension between the accepted racism against Asian Tanzanians of the 1970s, and the diverse South Asian communities that actually reside in Tanzania. Consequently, food traditions bore the burden of hybrid South Asian sensory knowledge in Tanzania, influenced by Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoarashtrian, Ismaili and Bahai traditions as they collided with cosmopolitan, African ways of being. Through victuals and culinary specialties, the journeys of South Asian migrants in the diaspora are etched in olfactory and gustatory terms. They revive forgotten maps between Tanzania and India, and geographies like East Africa and South Asia, through contemporary practices of drinking and eating. These heterogeneous maps counter the stereotyping of Tanzanian Asians as a monolithic community and mark the multiplicity of these communities that are otherwise erased within the Tanzanian imaginary as simply “Asian.”16 This effervescent mise-­en-scène produced new kinds of tactile knowledge and all sorts of incipient meanings that percolate with displaced identities and new political selves. Each sensation activates a myriad of both physical and somatic neurons. The tactility of smell in the imbibing of spicy food for instance, impacts memory with a shock as the tongue savors the fingers of taste, spreading their glowing sensations across the nerves, the skin, the nose, the eyes and the heart. Smell awakens a past within the present, and taste touches the present through the past.17 For cultures such as those of the East coast of Africa and the Malabar Coast of India whose forms of social knowledge have been fragmented and mutated by multiple experiences of conquest and cultural contact, tactile practices are difficult

96   Periplus to read and contain multiple meanings. Such practices might manifest in informal events that are intrinsic to everyday life; events through which cultural knowledge gets cited, transmitted, or re-­appropriated. The senses acquire texture. The simple but extravagant gesture of taking time out for a cup of chai is one such practice. This informal tradition practiced by South Asian migrants such as the Malayalees of Kerala, extends from Dar es Salaam and Abu Dhabi to Hanoi and Toronto. Tea drinking among the Malayalees provides a tactile respite and is a material invocation of a way of being that contrasts with the speed and stress of modernity. For Malayalees in Dar es Salaam, a cup of chai spaces the day. For the Malayalees, consumption of chai is mapped onto old trade routes reiterating older connections between the East coast of Africa and the Kerala coast in southern India. Called chai in Swahili and chaya in Malayalam, this intricate concoction of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, tea and sugar, is a metonymic reminder of a particular maritime history predating the arrival of the Arabs and the Portuguese to East Africa and India. It is an ocean in a cup of tea, with tales of ships, spices, silk and dubious trades. Containing colonial ambitions and postcolonial migratory histories, drinking chai opens up a whole sphere of life that links multiple sites from Basra, Hormuz, Zanzibar and the Malabar Coast to Malacca and Hangchow.18 For Indian immigrants in Dar es Salaam, a cup of tea provokes discussions about the impact of ujamaa (self-­reliance) in Tanzania under Nyerere; it sparks conversations about the shifts in Indian communist politics between the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Maoist wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M) and the Soviet aligned Communist Party of India (Marxist-­Leninist) CPI(M-­L). All matters of debate from Tanzanian socialism to Kerala communism are traversed through a cup of tea.

Notes   1 Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), 232.   2 Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 240.   3 Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 241.   4 Nyerere, “Education for Self-­Reliance” in Freedom and Socialism, 266.   5 Conversations with Celine Netto, my mother and former physical education instructor at Forodhani Secondary School, Kinondoni Secondary School, Azania Secondary School, Kisutu Secondary School and Shaaban Roberts.   6 See Julius Nyerere, “Education for Self-­Reliance” in Freedom and Socialism, 266. My own primary and secondary school experiences at Forodhani Primary School and Jangwani Secondary School in Dar es Salaam, and Arusha Secondary School in Arusha were informed by Nyerere’s “post-­Arusha” policy directive of March 1967 titled “Education for Self-­reliance.” Following this directive, a whole range of new ideas were implemented at the primary and secondary school levels, particularly the opening of farms, sweeping school grounds and tasks related to “nation building.”   7 Smriti Srinivas, “The Advent of the Avatar: The Urban Following of Sathya Sai Baba and its Construction of Tradition” in Charisma and Canon: The Formation of Religious Identity in South Asia, eds. Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar and Martin Christof-­Fueschle (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Srinivas’s enlightening history of the impact of the Sai Baba movement in East Africa opens up further

Dar-es-salaam, socialist utopia   97 thinking about the transactions of belief systems and somatic regimes in the Indian Ocean regions.   8 Victor M. Fic, Kerala: “Barrel of Gun and Political Power” in Yenan of India: Rise of Communist Power: 1937–1969 (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications Ltd., 1970), 77. The Kerala Communist Party was officially elected on April 5, 1957. It was spearheaded by E.M.S. Namboodiripad. For the first decade, the Communist Party of India (CPI) took its cues from Moscow. But according to Fic, it was comparable to the Chinese Yenan, “because it represented a focus of Communist power from which its influence could radiate until it engulfed the whole nation.” But it was in 1967 that the Indian Maoists of the new left within the CPI(Marxist) split from the CPI and established a new party devoted to Mao’s revolutionary theories and strategy. A further faction with solidarities toward the Soviets was created subsequently and called the Communist Part of India (Marxist-­Leninist) CPI(M-­L), more popularly known as the Naxalites in Kerala and West Bengal.   9 Julius K. Nyerere, “Frugality: 26 April 1965” in Freedom and Unity (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966). 10 Issa G. Shivji, Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania (New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books Inc, 1986), 88–89. Also see Issa G. Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 43–47. 11 Sahih Al-­Bukhari, “The Merits of the Prophet’s Companions” in Sahih Al-­Bukhari, The Early Years of Islam, trans. and explained by Muhammad Asad (Lahore: Arafat Publications, 1938), 128. Asad notes that even after Khadijah’s death, A’ishah was jealous of Khadijah as the Prophet’s love for Khadijah remained undiminished. According to Asad, the fact that the Prophet never married another woman during Khadijah’s life but took on other wives during A’ishah’s life, may have fueled A’ishah’s need to confess her jealousy for Khadijah, thereby glorifying Khadijah’s name and thus freeing herself from a consuming envy. 12 Sahih Al-­Bukhari, The Early Years of Islam, trans. and explained by Muhammad Asad (Lahore: Arafat Publications, 1938), 129. 13 “Malaika, How I Love You My Angel” (translation mine) was a popular Swahili song by Miriam Makeba. 14 Glossary of Swahili words (all translations are mine):    jambo (greetings)    karibu (welcome)    furaha (happiness)   khanga (type of local African garb similar to the sarong of Southeast Asia and lungi    of South India)   kitenge (fabrics with specific African designs known as kitenge popular in Tanzania    during the postcolonial era). 15 St. Francis Xavier’s High School in Bangalore staged a few ngomas choreographed by resident African students during the mid-­1970s. 16 K.N Chaudhuri “Food and Cuisine” in Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 151–181. Chaudhuri elaborates on Fernand Braudel’s theory that food and drink constitute the ground work of material life and bear a level of history that alters only slowly over time. Chaudhuri points out that the social practices of individual and collective eating and drinking were critical markers of personal identities and social affiliations historically. 17 Nadia Serementakis, “The Memory of the Senses” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), 218. 18 Janet Abu-­Lughod, “The Strait and Narrow” in Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 304–305.

98   Periplus Abu-­Lughod points out that by the fourteenth century, the Strait of Malacca had become a crossing point for the sea trade routes between Arab, Chinese, Indian and Mediterranean Europe. Chinese ships sailed as far west as Quilon and Arab and Indian ships sailed into Chinese harbors.

Bibliography Al-­Bukhari, Sahih. The Early Years of Islam, translated and explained by Muhammad Asad. Lahore: Arafat Publications, 1938. Al-­Bukhari, Sahih. “The Merits of the Prophet’s Companions.” In Sahih Al-­Bukhari, The Early Years of Islam, translated and explained by Muhammad Asad. Lahore: Arafat Publications, 1938. Chaudhuri, K.N. “Food and Cuisine.” In Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1900. Fic, Victor M. “Barrel of Gun and Political Power.” In Yenan of India: Rise of Communist Power: 1937–1969. Bombay: Nachiketa Publications Ltd., 1970. Nyerere, Julius K. 1965–67: Freedom and Socialism. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968. Nyerere, Julius K. “Frugality: 26 April 1965.” In Freedom and Unity. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966. Serementakis, Nadia. “The Memory of the Senses.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, edited by Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. Shivji, Issa G. Class Struggles in Tanzania. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976. Shivji, Issa G. Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania. New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books Inc, 1986. Srinivas, Smriti. “The Advent of the Avatar: The Urban Following of Sathya Sai Baba and its Construction of Tradition.” In Charisma and Canon: The Formation of Religious Identity in South Asia, edited by Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar and Martin Christof-­Fueschle. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

7 Hanoi palimpsest*

Hanoi palimpsest The cadre hat sat on the basic wooden table, crisp, severe and formal. A sign of time passing away and a token of history’s experiment gone awry. Souvenirs of the city stir as kitsch gecko sounds and tube lights spasm. Hip young women cadres in crisp Khaki uniforms and a casual air about them attend to arrivals at Hanoi airport. I had heard about the forbidding array of armed, sunglassed and uniformed cadres but was unprepared for this disarming entourage of immigration apparatchiks. Their rigid hats by their side on the table made communist paraphernalia look chic and almost a flavor-­of-the-­day trend that belonged to the streets in Soho. This striking presence of women cadres as representatives of the state at immigration checkpoints is symptomatic of a visible trend along the class spectrum of Hanoi’s public spaces. Fashionable working women, students, workers, peasants, hip teens, middle-­class women all partake of the daily workings of the city. The people of the city meet you before the city does, in a teeming flow of socialist modernity. Scooters, cyclos, minibuses, bicycles, pedestrians. Dreams deferred. Khmer towers, Cham balustrade and Soviet architecture unfold a flat city transforming. The heightened presence of women commuters on the streets of Hanoi catch my eye. Women on two-­wheelers with kids standing in front; women with large bundles of goods on the front and back of scooters; women with their mothers on the back and baggage in front; women on mopeds and bikes—the city of Hanoi is a hum in motion, afloat in speed and change. The roar of the scooter engines cumulatively create a sphere of noise and drone in keeping with the city’s surging thrust forward. No one here is looking back. The fix is on the future. Uncle Ho’s conservatism on clothing for the nation has given way to adventure and style for women on the street. Fashion has never been more important, with tight Soho flared pants and strapped tops with the bra-­straps showing. Impossibly daring shoes occasionally shock amidst the largely sensible display of footwear. Social change begins with the feet—this is what the shoe stores

100   Periplus seem to be saying, as innovative designs of balsam wood shoes and extraordinarily inventive platform shoes stare at passers-­by in the old quarter. Straps, heels, wedges, pumps, slides, spikes, boots, clogs. Reinventing the flatness of the city, these are plastic and wooden vehicles of mobility. Hanoi is a city discovering a passion for feet adornments. Its streets pulse with the throb of intensity.

City between the rivers Located outside the Royal city, the contemporary city of old Hanoi is the remnant of the Market Town of Thang Long; it is known as the Commoner’s City or “Kinh Thanh.” Old Hanoi is structured around the ceremonial lake of Hoan Kiem, with the Ho Tay (West Lake) and Song Hong (Red River) framing it to the north and east, the To Lich River to the west, and a number of lakes stretching south. An eleventh-­century anonymous description of the ancient capital describes its topography as resembling “a coiled dragon or a crouching tiger.”1 Despite its watery location, the contemporary historic city has the condensed structure of an inland feudal city whose imagination is centered south toward the ceremonial lake rather than on all sides toward its watery borders. One of the older cities in Indochina, Hanoi bears the mapping of many similar cities traumatized by colonial occupation. Its geography moves from the internal logic of mercantile trading zones of the old quarter to the artificially imposed grid-­like structure of modern Hanoi which was designed by the French between 1884 and the early twentieth century. A post-­revolutionary Vietnamese aesthetic organizes the rest of Hanoi with the heavy hand of Soviet planning and architecture embossed upon the city’s visage through the design of Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, the redesign of Ba Dinh Square and the Soviet-­Vietnamese Friendship Cultural Palace. Meandering through the bustling streets of the City of Thirty-­Six Streets in the summer of 2000, the minutiae of detail floods the field of vision as movement, human activity and everyday life unfold on the antique sidewalks of the eleventh-­century trading city. People gather on the corner of streets by sidewalk cafés for snacks and communal meals. Women in transit to the marketplace carry loads of fruit and vegetables in hanging baskets balanced intricately on either side of their shoulders. Children cycle to school, deftly maneuvering the dense traffic. Women drive plants on their bicycles en route to the florists, their pink upholstered cyclos jostling pedestrians, scooters and cycles. The ear sees and the eye blurs. A suffusion of bi-­pedal intensity and dense living draws the traveler into a place of habitation filled with the machinations of a throbbing Asian city. Food smells and intense sounds interrupted by the roar of two-­wheeled transport creates a moving theater of sensations that are at once distinctly grounded to this particular city, and simultaneously invoke the comforting mnemonic trace of other trading cities traversed: Cochin, Mombasa. Dense, seductive, intoxicating. Hanoi is a city of historical junctures, colonial and postcolonial, utopian and modernist, nationalist and postmodernist. A portal to understanding the logic of

Hanoi palimpsest   101 simultaneity and interconnectedness that shaped socialist cities like Dar es Salaam, Cairo, Dakar and Sarajevo, the city bears the scars of its violent modernity in ways reminiscent of strategically important medieval cities transformed by their brutal histories of feudal, colonial and nationalist struggles. Poignantly caught in the threshold of what was formerly imagined as “Second World cities,” Hanoi’s visage embodies the performance of frugality. Its political figures, ideologies and strategic location mark it as a city of resistance combined to create specific utopic sites. It is a quickly transitioning monument to the movements of scarcity and frugality that shaped a sphere of modernity during the twentieth century.

Frugal city For socialist cultures of the last century, the frugal city bears a special place in the Second World imaginary. It is a city filled with the ghosts of its history, and the specters of ours. The frugal city was a utopic city, what Foucault calls “a site with no place.” It was the space of the ideological phantasmatic, a city quietly resilient in its conviction to survive all odds. A city of fragments—Hanoi is a utopic city, lacerated by its dystopic realization. Repressed, buoyant, resilient, seductive, restrained, proud, Hanoi demands to be read with submission. For the itinerant traveler, only an epidermal reading of Hanoi’s layered history is possible. There are the clearly delineated spaces of the transitioning modernist capital city where the space of trade, the space of health and the space of the nation are geographically and somatically intertwined by the trace of the ancient city. Today’s old quarter is a vestige of the former Commoner’s City, while the area around Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum marks the borders of the ancient citadel walls, now marked by the solitary One Pillar Pagoda. New buildings and roads are built over the ashes of old, and the traveler perceives something familiar—of having traversed a similar layered landscape of historic past and surging modernity in another space and time. Of having come of age amidst the vestiges of a changing economy in another continent, as transitioning political ideologies collide. The visual signs of fervent entrepreneurialism most embodied by Ho Chi Minh City juxtaposed with obsolete forms of communal farming remind me of Tanzanian and Indian transformations toward agrarian modernization. The circumspect commercialism surrounded by a revitalizing sphere of individual entrepreneurial spirit is exciting after the jaded greed of New York City’s Wall Street. Old fashioned communal generosity jostles with the capitalist drive in ways that have been lost forever in the suburban sprawl of America. Yet, “America” looms large in Vietnam. Vietnamese-­ Amer­icans like the Los Angeles-­based Alain Tan have returned here with entrepreneurial innovations in fast food—“Pho,” the protean noodle dish, is considered to be the Vietnamese answer to McDonalds.2 But the structuring logic of a three-­world system which shaped relationships of solidarity in cities like Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Vientiane and Hanoi during the

102   Periplus colonial period of the first half of the twentieth century and later the Cold War operated under a different logic of frugality. Colonial exploitation of local and national resources was followed by postcolonial attempts at failed utopic social engineering. For emerging states crippled by the history of colonialism, socialist and communal forms of social organizing offered a radical reconceptualization of power, society and space on what appeared to be modern and utopic terms. These reformist turned totalitarian experiments offered a way out of feudal systems of monarchical and tribal forms of social organization. Socialism was a means of addressing a post-­independence transition crisis. The postcolonial city offered a heretofore unknown space for modern self-­invention to indigenous subjects. It also etched modernizing regimes of control and policing, new forms of surveillance, as well as fear and conformity onto the façade of the city. For Hanoi—as for Asian cities like Djakarta, Eastern European cities like Riga or the former East Berlin—the physical layout of the capital city mirrored the ideology of the state. Socialist housing, public monuments and statues of Lenin and Ho commemorate the communist state and its citizens. These monuments delineate the horizontal perspective of the main transportation arteries and junctures; they link the medieval city, the colonial city and the post-­revolutionary city of Hanoi.3 While these now historically defunct and socially catastrophic experiments have proven to be colossal travesties with far reaching human consequences, the spheres of social imagining metabolized within these societies are only beginning to be articulated. The urban expressions of such state ideologies of frugality produced particular experiences of twentieth-­century modernity. Socialist cities such as Dar es Salaam and Dakar in Africa, Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia and Vientiane in Laos, link the International Style with Marxist cities in the Second World space of the mid-­twentieth century. Often marked by postwar socialist housing, signs of urban decay, eroding residential buildings and nineteenth-­century graciousness converted into twentieth-­century overcrowded housing, these cities bore an aura of frugality through the public staging of urban neglect. The frugal city, the one that combined mass housing with minimal expenditure, redefined Bauhaus style as proletarian. The minimalism of Bauhaus merged with the frugality of socialist policies and generated a new post-­independence framework of uniform housing that was rational, devoid of character and driven by productivity. The result was a mushrooming of mass housing in the form of micro-­cities, such as the Tanzanian “ujamaa village” which became a symbol of modernization for Second World cities. It generated new perceptual frameworks of frugality in relation to efficiency, economic need and aesthetic minimalism. On a different visual register from the verticality of Manhattan’s minimalism, the horizontal frugality of Hanoi’s visage is a series of social and psychic practices determined by the extraordinary history of resistance and revolution that has shaped the geography of this city’s imagination. Frugality is a tangible presence hovering around Hanoi. It is embossed on people’s bodies and faces, and on the physiognomy of the city: Soviet modernist architecture, Indian-­made trains, thirties French urban planning, fifties experiments in suburban sprawl,

Hanoi palimpsest   103 Buddhist minimalism, communist restraint, the austerity propelled by Five-­Year plans and an increasingly beleaguered economy.

City of the senses On the Street of China Bowls, the cock crows a fetid dawn. Comforting sounds of the street sweeper scrape the refuse of yesterday’s excess as leaves, plastic, paper and mortality echo through the intimate streets of the City of Thirty-­Six Streets. A little girl takes her first bicycle ride as women on bicycles with long coats and conical hats weave their way through cool damp roads, where satellites atop eroding rooftops beam dreams of France and Hollywood—odorless fantasies, grasped in the stronghold of greed and gluttony, consumptive desire in its ecstatic, self-­devouring trance. Embers of wealth as paper devotions lie resplendent in commodities of appeasement on Hang Ma Street or the Street of Ghost Money. Here, a candle for graceless death at the corner of the street makes paper ghosts a respite for bodies that cannot be retrieved. Incense, red candlesticks and cardboard mausoleums on Hang Quat Street (Fan Street) offer solace for loss and desire as unspoken dreams drift in the myriad lights of smoke and fragrance. Silver and red tinsel monuments burn reminders of troubled spirits and reconciled souls. Fragrant vapors suffuse Thuoc Bac Street (The Street of Herbal Medicine), as herbs, seeds, twigs, leaves and traditional medicines arrest one’s olfactory senses. Vermilion, magenta, fuchsia and saffron silks drape the storefronts of Hang Gai Street (Silk Street), rousing the skin to a panoply of color and texture. Fine laquerware and ornate paintings distract the eye. The old quarter hugs the northeastern part of The City Between The Rivers like a medula oblongata. It is distinctly medieval in its compressed labyrinth of non-­gridded winding streets and alleys, and it remains a mnemonic link between the historic and the modern, a palimpsest of multiple spatial frameworks and temporal materializations. Now an eclectic mix of commodities and desires, the City of Thirty-­Six Streets was built as a commercial and residential center on the periphery of the forbidden city for the commoners as well as for soldiers and administrators of the Royal palace during the eleventh-­century. The market town continues to link the different trades, commodities and services in an ever-­ changing network of mercantile activity. Called the cité Indigène during the French colonial occupation, the old city bears residues of its former trading economies and artisan commodities such as Han Muoi (The Street of Salt) and Hang Bac (The Street of Silversmiths). These trade and artisan logics have transitioned with forms of modern consumption from old trades of bamboo, rattan, hemp and cotton to new trades of plastic, aluminum, polyester and internet cafés. Old trades give way for new desires. Hang Bong (The Street of Cotton) now sells art, plastic and electronics; Chan Cam (the Street of Stringed Instruments) sells art, tourist bric-­a-brac and some musical instruments.4 The City of Thirty-­Six Streets demands a reworking of space on a more compressed human scale of movement, rather than the modernist, grid-­like spaces

104   Periplus determined by the size of the automobile that circumvents this medieval space of mercantile logic. It is a self-­enclosed universe of dense social life that offers an alternative structure of daily life to the rest of the pulsing city. Tight-­knit social spaces generate compact multi-­purpose public uses. Here, tailors, launderers, shoemakers, hair dressers, restaurateurs, confectioners, bakers, beauticians, fish mongers, fruit vendors and herbalists work and live within the same space, proliferating the possible distractions in this revitalizing city of the senses. Tube-­ like dwellings create intense proximities.5 The verticality of this space allows for at least four levels of everyday activities— the street, the pavement, the rooftops and the interiorized space of everyday social activity. Across the rooftops of the old quarter, space expands in a myriad of uses: roof gardens, clotheslines, balconies of children’s paraphernalia. The solitary bombed-­out hull of a roof top remains a lingering reminder of a violent, hovering past. A girl stretches in languorous ease in the searing light of dawn. These dense outer spaces offer an array of public social life that complements life on the streets, where corner eateries, cafés and street-­level hangout joints allow for a variety of informal gathering points on the street. The smell of roasting fish wafts across the cool of the Hanoi night on Cha Ca Street (Street of Roasted Fish). Shadows linger in the curves of the tree-­lined streets as women from the market return with empty baskets, which earlier had been heavy with watercress, mint and scallions. Local economies, fast disappearing.

Lake of memory Shaped like a fluid heart, the expanse of serene water called the Hoan Kiem Lake stretches south of the old quarter. It borders the southernmost streets of the old city like a blue gauze, thick with memory and history. The centrality of this immense body of water is haunted by its few remaining historic monuments, marking the city’s struggle for sovereignty. The Tortoise Pagoda in the middle of the lake is symbolically crowned with a single red star; the Ngoc Son Temple (Jade Mountain) is an eighteenth-­century construction located at the northern part of the lake, accessible by The Rising Sun Bridge, a red wooden bridge that imbues the lake with a ceremonial memory of sovereignty and health. The Ngoc Son Temple resonates as an anti-­colonial sign of the victory of the Vietnamese against the Mongols in the thirteenth century—it is also dedicated to the patron saint of physicians, La To. The inhabitants of this city use this span of water for a plethora of uses. From morning till dusk, Hoan Kiem (the Lake of the Restored Sword) is a space of healing and an intense physical inhabitation. It lies serene amidst the young trees and new concrete park structures of the urban corniche. It is a space filled with multiple crossings, old and new, fraught and passionate. As dawn rises, the elderly engage in qui gong; others practice Tai Chi. The young participate in physical exercise, some jogging and others pushing hands. Some meditate, others walk or sit and chat. In the afternoon, groups of men play checkers or gamble, huddled by the stone balustrades. Food vendors, herbalists, paper

Hanoi palimpsest   105 vendors, t-­shirt vendors, fruit sellers, retired army officers, women with weighing scales, street children and groups of young men stroll, wander, saunter or sit on the stone benches. Meditation, romance, play, intrigue, camaraderie—all unfolds around the periphery of this magnetic sweep of water. Born of legend, the lake is the heart of a reunified Vietnam. It geographically grounds Hanoi and is the mythic originary space of modern Vietnamese nationalist identity. The legend is that with the help of a magical sword received from the celestial skies, the fifteenth-­century ruler Le Loi drove the invading Chinese out of Vietnam. After securing the city, a giant turtle is said to have risen out of the depths of Hoan Kiem Lake and reclaimed the heavenly weapon from the King.

Colonial urbanites and frugality The extent of Hanoi’s impact on the international imaginary during the early part of the twentieth century is powerfully linked to the charismatic nomadism of its most famous inhabitant, Ho Chi Minh. The lure of Hanoi lies in its extraordinarily rich history of resistance and revolution, most tangibly marked by the lingering specter of its dead architect. It is in the old quarter of Hanoi that the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was drawn up by Ho Chi Minh at 48 Hang Ngang Street. Seaman, gardener, pastry chef (he supposedly worked in Paris with Escoffier), photographer and painter, Ho was a man who went by many aliases in different countries. “After World War One,” Ho Chi Minh writes in the 1920s, “I made my living in Paris, now as a retoucher at a photographer’s, now as painter of ‘Chinese antiquities’ (made in France!). I would distribute leaflets denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonialists in Viet-­nam.”6 When Ho signed up in 1911 as a mess boy on the crew of the Latouche-­ Treville, a liner operating between Haiphong and Marseille, he chose the path of the emigrant and marked the crossroads for many revolutionaries-­to-be of his era. Economic necessity, colonial rule and a curiosity to experience the boundaries of the empire’s reach freed him to choose the open ocean over known territory. What Ho and many other Third World intellectuals like him learned in the metropoles of the North would later become tools to unlearn the grip of empire. What is interesting in Ho’s anecdote is the key role played by world cities like Paris, London and New York in the nurturing of anti-­colonial revolutionaries and their philosophies of state frugality through socialism. Like Ho—who visited Oran, Dakar, Diego-­Suarez, Port Said, Alexandria, Le Havre, New York and London—Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Nehru, Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta all sojourned to the Western metropoles, including Paris, London and New York. During the 1920s and 1930s, these cities were vibrant crucibles of revolutionary sentiment, inspired by the still-­resounding echoes of the French and Haitian revolutions and aided by the Russian revolution, the Third International and the rising tide of rebellion across the different colonial dominions. By the 1920s in Paris, Ho Chi Minh’s theoretical conceptualization of peasant revolutions was unusual for a member of the French Communist Party. His

106   Periplus p­ reoccupation with the condition of Annamese peasantry in relation to colonial oppression found little sympathy among his French comrades. Even vociferous anti-­colonialist French communists such as Jacques Rivet, the socialist deputy and director of the Musee de l’Homme and famed champion of the Vietnamese cause, parted ways with their colonized comrades on the matter of the independence of Vietnam from the French. Aware of the painful rift between the class sympathies of the French Left and those of its colonized nationalists of different African and Asian colonies, Ho Chi Minh turned to Moscow and Yunan for strategies that would sharply redefine the future shape of the Vietnamese social revolution. Mao did not come to the fore until later.7 Like other cosmopolitans of his generation, the metropolitan city of Paris opened up the colonial edifice on new terms for the colonial emigrant. In Paris, Ho could be anonymous as he immersed himself in a close study of French socialism. Absorbing Proudhon, studying the skirmishes between Lenin, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg, meeting students from West Indian and African states—all of this sharpened Ho’s views as to the direction he should take the nationalist cause in the search for self-­determination. For Ho, that direction was laid out in Lenin’s, “Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions,” published by L’Humanité.8 The confidence inspired by Lenin’s slim tract on the crucial distinction between First World socialism and the interests of colonized peoples, as well as the impact of the Third International on the group of African, Caribbean and Asian colonized nationals in Paris, London and New York, should not be underestimated. For the generation of black and Third World radicals coming of age during this time, socialism and communism offered a structure for organizing both colonized and working-­class peoples of the world. These were the tools of modernity that oppressed peoples could deploy in the interests of sovereignty and self-­determination. At the heart of this tract of modernization through collectivization and proletarianization was a notion of frugality that would shape future agendas of modernization in the Third World. This conception of frugality was grounded in the urban milieus of colonial cities. In his various essays, letters and speeches written between 1920 and 1930, Ho Chi Minh is a vociferous advocate for decolonization of Africa and Asia. His meetings with fellow colonial subjects from Africa and the West Indies obviously impacted his own profoundly internationalist sense of anti-­colonial social change across national boundaries. While there is no mention of who these West Indian and African comrades are, the time Ho spent in Paris crosses with the time spent by Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Claude McKay. Each hails from a different colonial city—Dakar, Fort-­de-France and Harlem, respectively— but each had lived in Paris during this time and was either socialist or communist. These writers were formulating the emerging concept of negritude which theorized the urban modernity of black radicals seeking modes of self-­ determination within the city and the oppressive state. For Senghor, negritude was an amalgamation of the colonial experience and West African gnostic traditions that had been demonized by Christianity. While drawing upon the intellectual legacies of French socialism, from Saint-­Simon, Proudhon, Teilhard de Chardin

Hanoi palimpsest   107 and the French Communist Party, negritude offered an African-­centered approach to modernity. As articulated by Senghor, Césaire and McKay, negritude was an urban philosophical response to the colonial presence. It consolidated the critical response in Paris and in Africa to the ethnographic exoticism of Africa as tribal and pre-­modern. Incorporating particular inflexions of African cultural and gnostic traditions, Senghor’s negritude offered strategies of socialist modernity—an African-­derived frugality that drew upon locally based forms of community and kinship organization while incorporating global capital and the world market into its machinations. Such concerns on the part of black intellectuals in Paris intersected with the concerns of Annamese and other Indo-­Chinese intellectuals sojourning in Paris for similar reasons of exposure and strategy. The impact of the city of Paris in the fermenting of a certain Third World revolutionary nationalist spirit during this period of the early twentieth century was extraordinary. This impact worked at various levels. Interactions were made possible by the dense agglomeration of colonial subjects in the colonial metropole who were in search of an education that was structurally impossible to have back home. The proximity of black and Asian intellectuals, students and merchants within the spaces of Paris made possible a sense of historic connectedness that was otherwise successfully compartmentalized by colonial mapping and governmentality. Frantz Fanon was a contemporary of Ho’s whose work greatly elaborated on the relationship of French colonial space and the postcolonial somatic space. Arriving in Marseille in the 1940s, the port of arrival for Ho Chi Minh a few years before, Fanon was shocked into a moment of profound alienation in the colonizer’s city. “Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation running over my body suddenly abraded into non­ being, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movement, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.9 This atavism startles the colonial emigrant into a state of cosmopolitan alienation, at once disavowing and recognizing the moment of fragmentation. As Fanon points out, colonial “thingification” was a structuring logic that bound colonial spaces to each other through the elaborate edifice of colonial architecture and subjectification. A colonized Martiniquan subject whose nomadism ­produced a phenomenology of black modernity, Fanon’s perception of the

108   Periplus impact of colonial space on the colonial psyche links with nomadic Ho Chi Minh’s own crusade for a decolonized Vietnam. A vociferous opponent of “thingification,” Ho chose the path of subterfuge and strategy to undo the technologies of empire.

Forgetting Ho It is said that Ho Chi Minh never wanted to be buried or hagiographed. He explicitly requested that he be cremated and his ashes spread so that the impulse to deify would not be there.10 Like Walter Benjamin, Ho was profoundly opposed to monumentality and his fear was that he would be mummified and made monumental. As the master of strategy and vigilant protean self-­invention, he dreaded petrification. Dead monuments and archaic forms of devotion embodied the excesses of accumulation. Emancipation meant freeing the state from the static manifestations of capital. And yet, the city of Hanoi bears the burden of Ho’s fear. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is a monstrously unfrugal tribute that is at once stultifying, bizarre and unnerving. Its Soviet-­designed realization contradicts the graceful lines of Ho’s own house on stilts, which he preferred to the Presidential residence. Ho’s own simple aesthetic of bamboo and wood clashes with the cold remoteness of the marble mausoleum that houses the earthly remains of this most protean of revolutionaries. Wrapping their way silently around the inarticulate monument are an astounding serpentine trail of pilgrims. The unforgettable and infectious power of thousands of people standing in humble veneration to pay their respects to a serene effigy of revolution begs a reconsideration of the power of freedom to fire the imagination of the Vietnamese people. This space of secular pilgrimage is peopled by a remarkable range of devotees, a moving and powerful testament to the inspiring power of a frugal man who defied the limits of possibility. Peasants from the provinces and travelers from the interior; hip students from southern cities dressed inappropriately in tight shorts and high heels—the winding line of respectful travelers transforms the banality of waiting to an exercise in national reification, where the space of the nation and the line of people converge in a momentary enactment of national belonging. This is a utopic imagined space of nationness on the move. And yet simultaneously, it is a deadly ossified space. It is the death of freedom embodied by the static monumentality of the carceral architecture of Soviet modernism. Visiting this dead space of the imagined nation is a contradictory event. It contrasts the live nationalist sentiments and devotion of peoples across generations with the monumental ennui of dead architecture. People move in attitudes of curious deference, winding their way across the cold cryptic spaces of the eerie mausoleum. Static monumentality devours the macro-­scale human motion of people lined up to pay their respects to the mummified representation of modern Vietnam’s architect. The event is at once a process of forgetting Ho and marveling at one of the last extraordinary public performances of modern nationalist sentiment. It is the voluntary and involuntary veneration of a national hero as a tourist site; a vestigial spectacle of the last century.

Hanoi palimpsest   109

Notes   * This piece was written in 2000, at the beginning of the liberalization of Vietnam’s economy. Vietnam played a large, affective role in my youth as a socialist cadre in Tanzania, and in the mythology of radical communism in Kerala, South India. One of the fantasy places I envisioned as a young socialist in 1970s Bangalore was to visit Hanoi. Of course, it seemed a total impossibility, or teen foolishness at the time. Though marginalized in the U.S academy even today, this very specific trajectory of Second World imaginings connecting Tanzania to Kerala, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Vietnam and glasnost Russia is a powerful affective space that is slowly being taken seriously as a field worthy of affective scholarship. I am leaving this piece as is in order to capture an entirely lost era, the last views of a closed economy whose revolutionary fervor inspired so many of us who are floating international socialists, lost in diaspora. Hanoi felt like the Dar es Salaam of my teen years, and this piece is a nostalgic visitation of my lost youth in the Dar es Salaam of the 1970s: low tech, low lying, serene and intellectually vibrant.   1 Mark Seidel, Old Hanoi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–4.   2 The Saigon Times, No. 1–2000 (430), January 1, 2000, 23. Also see The Saigon Times Weekly, No. 46, 1999 (423) November 13, 1999.   3 Abidin Kusno, “Modern Architecture and Traditional Polity: Jakarta at the Time of Sukarno” in Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures In Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2000), 49–70.   4 Mark Sidel, “The Early History of Hanoi” in Old Hanoi, 4.   5 Mark Sidel, Old Hanoi, 55. The distinctive “tube houses” of old Hanoi are long and narrow constructions, 2 × 4 m wide and two stories tall. These residences are fronted by a shop facing the street. The middle rooms contain manufacturing or assembly facilities while the interior spaces are residential domestic quarters. Some of these “tube houses” were originally built with small inner courtyards, sometimes enhanced by water pools or fountains.   6 Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism” in On Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–66 (New York: Praeger, 1967), 23.   7 Ruth Fischer in Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 44.   8 Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh (New York: Vintage, 1968), 31.   9 Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1956), 109. 10 Mark Sidel, Old Hanoi, 61.

Bibliography Abu-­Lughod, Janet. “The Strait and Narrow.” In Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1956. Kusno, Abidin. “Modern Architecture and Traditional Polity: Jakarta at the Time of Sukarno.” In Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. New York: Routledge, 2000. Lacouture, Jean. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Minh, Ho Chi. “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism.” In On Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–66. New York: Praeger, 1967. Seidel, Mark. Old Hanoi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

8 Bamiyan pillage

I Nervous eyes May 2004. Spit. Sweat. Spasm. Slime. My mouth goes dry as I walk by the newsstand, eyes nervously darting through the lurid morning papers laid out for hapless readers to gorge on the horrors of the day.

Ii Shock and awe Shock and Awe No beads for tin can lids, or spice for slaves. The palette is more refined, the stakes higher. The game is occupation without memory blood without accountability burnt flesh without acrid odor. Terrifying. Coffee washes the guilt of the complicitous All manner of consumption becomes pillage food The quiet of the café reverbrates with the screams of yet another Baghdad café with kahawa and cigarettes blown up in deafening silence. A “perfect strike.” Unaccounted. Inconsequential. The coffee lingers. Panic recedes. Another day in the pillage feast.

Iii Punishment of images Amidst silk routes and opium dreams two Buddhas stand A spectral haunting of the past Whither compassion? they ask Must we be defaced? Their visage Gandhara the Buddhas forgive as they explode.1 It is the punishment of images.

Bamiyan pillage   111

Iv Blinding footprints Buildings implode against the New York sky, a strange pall of darkness cloaks the city that never sleeps. New York stands still for a blinding moment. The city loses sight momentarily. Walking against the rubble of life erased, a stark light exposes the past of downtown Manhattan. Here, among the heavy concrete ruins lies a history of the sixteenth-­century Iroquois and Lenape, then a history of the Egyptian and Yemeni immigrants of the 1890s. Now all that remains is the history of the present, rewritten to fill the enormous footprints of the now-­ missing Twin Towers. This story is a telling of the past. A marking of a passing. Yet, it is only a partial history of the passing. In its wake, it leaves a heap of rubble.

V Buddhas of Bamiyan Neither within nor outside the city, the Bamiyan Buddhas stand etched into the sandstone walls of the plains of Central Asia. Decorated with flying Bodhisattavas, seated Bodhisatvas, couples seated in the Gandhara style of bodily comportment, they are among the first statuaries to anthropomorphize the Buddha since the inception of Buddhism 400 years before their construction under the aegis of Emperor Kanishka in the third century ad. In the attitude of the standing Sakyamuni and seated Buddha, they embody the emptying of the space of delusion, the space of human suffering (dukha). The Buddhas remind that delusion (moha) and ignorance (avidya) are the structures of unknowing that distract earthly beings from knowledge that leads to enlightenment. They caution against defilement (klesa), that place of mortal habitation between craving or thirst (trsna), hatred (dvesa) and delusion (moha)—the three roots of evil articulated in The Eight Fold Path of the Sakyamuni. Earthly life is a space that must be emptied of all desire through the relinquishing of the passions. Such a release of the senses can take place through the mudras or gestures of wrathful deities. These are often Royal spirits whose ferocious physiognomy and diabolical mudras (such as the menacing Tarjani mudra whose index finger extends upwards while the thumb tightly clasps the other three fingers in the palm of the hand) purge the earth of malevolent sentiments.2 Gluttony, avarice, boredom, usury, privilege and envy are the domains of earthly life inhabited by wrathful deities whose mediations purge feelings (vedana) toward a state of insight.

Vi Envy and empire Envy unravels at the crossroads of desire and empire, economics and conquest, need and greed, cosmologies and theologies. James of Vitry, a renowned preacher writing in the beginning of the thirteenth-­century France, was imbued with the spirit of the crusades and was greatly dismayed by the replacement of the crusades with the tournaments of knights as entertainment. To him, invidia is the sin of peasants and paupers that transcends class.3 In a diatribe against the

112   Periplus vices of jousting promoted by the culture of wandering bands of knights, Vitry sermonizes against the impoverishment of the imagination that follows the practice of tournaments with its trail of blood, rapine and odium. To Vitry, the envy of physical prowess is dispiriting. It is accompanied by avarice and sadness; it is a projection of want for that which cannot be acquired. It is a desire for excess: a yearning for the young warrior’s body by the leper; the coveting of vainglorious lust in the novice knight; the longing for the gluttony at the knight’s over-­laden table by the pauper. Envy is the recognition of that which is not within the self— that which brings greater praise in a battle of histrionics—of “crimes” and ­“cruelties,” of “homicides” and “bloodlettings.”

Vii Imperialism as seduction The bloodlettings of history are filled with the envious inscriptions of painters, poets, historians and chroniclers. A great scene of covetous desire illustrates Eugène Delacroix’s diaries recording his travels to Morocco and Algeria. Disembarking in Tangiers and Algiers in 1832, Delacroix describes a luscious spectacle of desire: Algerian women reclining in states of invitation, luring the artist’s gaze into the interiority of Algerian domestic life. Delacroix is intoxicated and envious. This is the fantasy he is searching for. The scene he cannot find at home that he displaces onto the brutal landscape of occupation and colonialism; the sense of intense heat and vibrant luminosity of the French in Algeria. The canvas is a visual one of imperialism as seduction. The drama is envy knowing a want that exceeds the knowable. It is heavy and perfumed, framed by blood. In Delacroix there is no desire that is not envy, and to covet it is to die a little. To covet is to surreptitiously hoard more than one can contain; it is to devour and to break the code of restraint. Through the smallest window, envy enters. It leads to pillage.

Viii Gluttonous blood In a spectacular tale of eating and drinking, the great storyteller Herodotus narrates the scene of an imperial tryst between Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae and the Persian conqueror Cyrus. On hearing of the capture of her drunk son, Spargapises, by the intrepid Cyrus, the defiant queen proclaims to Cyrus: Glutton as you are for blood, you have no cause to be proud of this day’s work, which has no smack of soldierly courage … Now listen to me and I will advise you for your good: give me back my son and get out of my country with your forces intact, and be content with your triumph over a third part of the Massagetae. If you refuse, I swear … to give you more blood than you can drink, for all your gluttony.4 Paying no heed to this warning, the formidable Cyrus engages the Massagetae in what Herodotus describes as a battle, “more violent than any other fought

Bamiyan pillage   113 between foreign nations.” At the end of the bloody onslaught, the Persian army is destroyed, Cyrus is killed after twenty-­nine years of kingship and the Massagetae gain the upper hand. The scene that follows is one that haunts every subsequent plunder feast. After the vicious war, Queen Tomyris orders a search among the decimated Persians for the body of Cyrus. When the dead invader is discovered, the enraged queen stuffs Cyrus’s head into a skin filled with human blood, crying out: “Though I have conquered you and live, yet you have ruined me by treacherously taking my son. See now—I fulfill my threat: you have your fill of blood.”5 Gluttonous blood spills democratically. Conqueror and vanquished, colonizer and colonized. It is the staining residue of history’s dialectic. Scenic brutality held accountable by the bloody presence of a distraught queen.

Ix Pillage feast Pillage feasts are never replete without a fill of blood. More blood than you can drink. Unlike the more gripping tales of tragedy and war recounted by Herodotus, today’s pillage feasts have no grand denouement of accountability and presence. There is no culminating scene of an invaded queen gone mad, seeking her fill of blood. In Hollywood thrillers, what remains is the ruin of war among the intrigue of lies, abnegation, dispersal, misinformation and secrecy. If the minion is left on stage, he is bereft of even that dubious pride of being an unknown soldier. It is the era of the unsung private contractor, bloody and soulless, hired to kill. Pillage is a ritual as old as society, with consumption under conditions of extreme violence becoming a staging ground for the gustatory display of power. The nature of the pillage feast varies. Blood for some, flesh for others, land for a select few. For such an economy of destruction, waste is the culminating experience. Buildings are blown up, bodies are wasted and entire cities are destroyed in a quest for more blood than one can drink. Left behind are shards of a tent here, fragments of a devastated neighborhood there; incinerated vehicles, broken toys, children with burnt limbs. Biafra. Somalia. Bosnia. Freetown. Kuwait City. Najaf. Kabul. A tragedy of waste. Plunder, ransacking, taking. Pillage violates what Marcel Mauss calls “the law of the gift” because to pillage is to consume without asking or reciprocating.6 It ruptures the intricate balance of giving, taking and receiving through which modern forms of exchange are negotiated. Mauss observes that negotiating food constitutes some of the most fundamental structures of social life. In his reading of the Brahminic code, Mauss notes that food that is given is food that will return to the giver—it is the same food the giver will find in his reincarnations. What is given away will be acquired yet again during the giver’s lifetime in other forms.7 According to Mauss, Anna, the Hindu deity of food, instructs that he who consumes food without first offering it to the gods, to his servants and to his

114   Periplus guests, swallows poison. Food consumes the gluttonous and becomes his death. But he who eats after he has fed those he should feed consumes ambrosia, partaking of the divine through food.8 It is the nature of food to be shared; not to share it is to kill its essence and to destroy it for oneself and for others. Drawing upon the structures of the gift in the Indian epic the Mahabharata, Mauss further elaborates that he who eats without knowledge kills the food, and once he eats of it in ignorance, the food kills him. Avarice, observes Mauss, breaks the circle of the law. Rewards and foods are perpetually reborn from one another.9 Through the ancient Hindu practice of gift exchange Mauss lays out certain formal instances of social interactions that effectively defer the condition of pillage. Gifts, givers and the kind of gifts given and received are crucial aspects of the exchange; curses and bonds between giver and recipient also play an important role in the culture of gift giving. Mauss underscores that the thing that is given generates an irrevocable bond, particularly when it involves food. Thus, he writes, one must not eat in the home of one’s enemy.10 To eat in the home of one’s enemy is to violate the codes of sociality. Pillage food. Pillage is an atavistic word, medieval in its implications. Elaborating upon the nature of pillage during the French occupation of Algeria in 1961, Jean-­Paul Sartre writes in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: It will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes ferocious; the country is marked out, there are mopping-­up operations, transfers of population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women and children … This book is not addressed to us. Yet I have written (the preface) in order to bring the argument to its conclusions; for we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip tease of our humanism. There you see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage, its honeyed words … alibis for our aggressions.… You know well enough that we are exploiters … we have laid hands on … gold and metals, then the petroleum of the “new continents,” … This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals, and our great industrial cities; and when there was … a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it.11 The world Sartre invokes is the French colonial scenario of 1950s Algeria: burnt bodies, electrocuted nerves and lacerated torsos. It is the mise-­en-scène of colonial pillage that winds through all of Africa, much of Asia and a considerable portion of the Third World during the first half of the twentieth century. The British in India, Hong Kong and Africa. The French in Indochina and North Africa. The Portuguese in Goa, Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde Islands. The Belgians in the Congo. It is an era when much of Europe ate in the house of the enemy, uninvited, unwelcome. Sugar. Spice. Cacao. Coffee. Cashews. Tea.

Bamiyan pillage   115 The history of colonialism of the last two centuries is a delectable history of gustatory violence spawned from the traumatic actuality of eating in the enemy’s home. It is food forged out of the trace memory of pillage. Syrupy Vietnamese coffee with its condensed milk at the bottom. Scrumptious Vietnamese baguettes. Portuguese goat cheese, the Ribafria, with its strong tang of Tellicherry pepper reminiscent of its colonial history in India’s Malabar Coast. Kerala “plum” wine of South India, made from local gooseberries, a marker of Portuguese occupation. The Goan sorpotel, a vivacious pork stew, Indian tea, British chutneys, West Indian Oxtail soup, the Kenyan dish irio, with its use of New World maize. Aromatic food born of fear. Pillage food. Under occupation, food becomes a powerful weapon of fear, suggests Fanon. Starvation, deprivation, scarcity and denial of food structure the logic of colonial wars and imperial governance. In turn, the impact of the enemy dining uninvited in a colonized culture foments syncretic cultures and hybrid cuisines. The East coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean cultures are a great instance of this crucible of imperialisms where food borne of fear has morphed into vernacular cuisines with distinctive differences. Madhur Jaffrey’s epicurean excursions underscore how the presence of the Mughals, Greeks, Arabs, Africans, Chinese, Portuguese, British and French in India catalyzed an extraordinary range of eating cultures.12 The Muslim biryani with its Arab influences and pomegranate sherbets is reminiscent of Persian cuisine, the Kerala congee is traced to Indo-­Chinese routes and the Tamil dosa echoes the French crêpe—these are some detours on the Indian Ocean journey. The spicy, tangy, sweet, sour, exploding textures of Indian cuisines bear the traces of their oppressors. Cardamom, cloves, coconut, saffron, pepper, nutmeg. Fragrant pillage feasts. To eat under occupation is to eat fearfully, uncertainly, nervously, surreptitiously, hastily. Frantz Fanon observes this through his case studies of Algerian patients treated by him for mental disorders during the French occupation of Algeria. Vomit, blood, dry mouth, dehydration, insomnia and paranoia inflect the intake of food under occupation. The colonial experience leads to a loss of appetite for the colonized, either through force, fear or trauma. Eating under colonialism is subordinated to other forms of bodily engagement such as sweating, vomiting, convulsing, twitching, drinking, bleeding, running, fighting, fasting, praying and hiding for the colonized. It becomes a sensation linked to bodily occupation and therefore its enjoyment is deferred to the moment when the coordinates of power are tolerable for the occupied.13 For Fanon, to eat is to be awake. Mahatma Gandhi locates the body and the consumption of food as central to the discourse of imperial power. His travels through England, South Africa and India under colonial rule convinced him that the body is the territory through which power operates, with the practices of food exchange acquiring a subtle and expansive reach thoroughly underestimated by both colonizer and colonized. The relationship between body, food practices and territorial sovereignty are interwoven in Gandhian discourse. To succeed in resisting and ultimately deposing imperial authority, it is imperative to Gandhi to begin with a politics of the bodily self, and of eating and drinking.

116   Periplus In Key to Health, parts of which were first written in South Africa in 1906, and then completed in 1942 while under house arrest by the British in the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona, India, Gandhi charts systems of consumption that disempower and mobilize the colonized subject. Food, drink, air, ether and the somatic become an intricate system of checks and balances through which political power is generated and managed.14 Everyday acts of walking, eating, or the denial thereof, in the form of sexual abstinence and fasting, become extensions of human biopower charged with the potential to engage or disengage. Gandhi’s analysis of eating, drinking and the rejection of pleasure through consumption is a strategic intervention against the practices of pillage. Even breath for Gandhi is a form of power through which the individual can act upon their condition of dispossession. His call for a practice of self-­denial of the erotics of living is a call for the intensification of the act of resistance to colonial authority, with enjoyment deferred as the unspoken understructure of freedom after independence. In Gandhi’s writings on health and food, eating is a means of protesting occupation; therefore, one must avoid all manner of food that bears the trace of pillage: tea, cocoa, opium, alcohol, ganja, spices. It becomes a means of training the senses to defer the pleasurable till true freedom through sovereignty transforms India to a democracy. Gandhi harnesses the yoga of eating as a tool of non-­violent action against oppression, and fasting actualizes as one of its most powerful weapons in the struggle for independence. For Gandhi, to eat is to resist. For the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, eating can be violent. Like Gandhi, Nat Hanh views food as a larger social realm of engagement. To partake of food is to participate in a geopolitical balancing act of famine and plenty. Subscribing to the philosophy of Vipasana, whereby all aspects of motion—eating, walking, protesting—are meditative, Nat Hanh teaches that an interconnected system of biopower provides “food” for the ecology of living. By violating the codes of consumption through avarice or violence, “We are eating our country, we are eating our earth, we are eating our children.” He said these words in a crowded hall to New Yorkers following September 11, 2001. In the activist monk’s opinion, unmindful eating is tantamount to “eating the flesh of your son and daughter … eating the flesh of your parent.”15 Nhat Hanh calls for a mindful consumption that refrains from producing commodities that spark war. For Thich Nat Than, to eat is to engage. In America, to eat is to forget. Perhaps this is why we Amer­icans are such anxious eaters. An expanding waist line and a new imperialism have conjoined in the catastrophic project of gas guzzling unsustainable modernity, captured in the distended plate of abundance. Too much food in too big portions. Drowning in a cornucopia of simulated enjoyment that dulls the senses. We eat as we pillage. Gorge in the home of the enemy without noticing that the United States is uninvited. Yet many in the United States want to be awakened, to engage, through food. This is a formidable challenge of Sisyphean proportions. Between the barrage of sensational information and processed foods,

Bamiyan pillage   117 our strategies for staying engaged are greatly jeopardized. Hopped-­up food and hyped-­up news necessitates alternative modes of information and consumption. To eat, after all, is to imagine.

X Tragic envy Dionysus: 

Tell me,    what punishment do you propose? Pentheus:  First of all,    I shall cut off your girlish curls.16 The cruelties of envy crowd the pantheon of the modern imaginary. Bloody punishment through the tortured blinding of one’s own eyes in horror and guilt haunt the living. In the tumultuous landscape of Greek tragedy, heroes are godly and the fall from grace is a merciless plunge filled with terror and pity. The drama of envy is malicious, racked by a killing passion of jealousy phthonos and condemned to a violent death outside the gates of the city.17 Envy is not a tool of restraint but a propelling fatal flaw of desire that leads to hubristic acts of arrogance, thereby bringing upon the self a catastrophic misfortune. Incest. Rape. Murder. Violent death. Banishment and exile. Envy in the landscape of malevolent passions is active and vengeful; it consumes the tragic subject to the point of destructive phthonos. The dangers of phthonos shift from the realm of playful, jealous gods and begrudged happiness to the menacing punishment of the jealous deity where success produces koros—the complacency of the man who is successful—which in turn leads to hubris, a primal evil whose wage is death.18 Envy in this cosmology of divine possession and terror leads to immoderate actions of spectacular proportions. The tragic act provoked by envy invokes pity and fear leading to a reversal of fortune and resolution through the mechanism of a deus ex machina. The fall from grace is a divine fall and the consequences of immense scale in these spectacles of misfortune.19 They allow the spectator a release from the socially destructive potential of invidia through the identification with an extreme experience. In Euripides’ classical form of the theater, envy is most successfully realized in the character of Pentheus from The Bachae and Phedre from Hippolytus. These characters embody an envy that ultimately destroys the world as they know it. Envy in Euripides is anthropomorphic: it resides within the self and it becomes the self. Phedre cannot shake off her envy and she is finally consumed by it as it leads her to suicide by hanging. Obsessed with, and jealous of, Dionysus’s great beauty and charisma, the mortal Pentheus hubristically imprisons and humiliates the god (who unknowingly to him, is also his cousin). Dionysus: 

A man, a man, and nothing more,    yet he presumed to wage a war with god.20

118   Periplus

Xi Cloistered eroticism Crisp, the sound of the Doha dunes in the dead heat of July sand. Languorous sand caresses legs  as they sink knee high into the warm quicksand dragging bodies down to where it’s heavy and dry and sharp. All that sand and water surrounds the senses  Like a cloak on reality begging for the serrated pain of a gash A luscious wound that would awaken one from the dull routine  of air conditioned interiors and one hundred and ten degree exteriors. The kind of heat that dries your insides. It is a summer of revelations. Burqaed women with haute couture and French perfume trysting with their hairdressers and drivers  from Baluchistan and Kerala, a cloistered eroticism of the voracious kind. Rumors Largely rumors string a ream of truth  about the sequestered city of desiring women whose love for Bollywood and candy  are only surpassed by a greater love for shopping, shopping, shopping. The great delirium of shopping keeps all that heat at bay the heat of encounter in the suk in the carrara marbled malls of Dubai rock and Maghrebian disco. The heat beneath the silk lingerie “made in China” caressing the smooth, well manicured thighs of caviar and dates, Labneh and tang, white chocolate torsos teasing black muslin. All that desire afloat in the verdant arid desert streets of Doha Ripe palms with nowhere to go restrained within the four walls of the palace of bourgeoisification. Persian carpets and Filipino nannies Indian servants and Pakistani laborers, A life of excess and a strange kind of deprivation.

Bamiyan pillage   119

Xii Contentious modernities November 3, 2002. Today is the sixth month anniversary of September 11, 2001. Terror lingers amidst unease. An unfolding spectacular horror grips my nightmares. As I write from Ground Zero, I can still smell the acrid smoke of the Twin Towers. Once again the borders between East Africa and the West overlap, and it is the specter of transnational terrorist organizations that unfortunately brings them together. It is clear that these connections are complicated. As the illusion of a unified terrorist network is revealed to the US populace, the truth of Al-­Qaeda networks remains undisclosed, as if it is not important. The fact is that there are Africans in Afghanistan; Islam exists in Africa, South and East Asia, as well as in the United States. There are black Arabs, African Muslims, Arab Africans and cosmopolitan Muslim cultures. Islam is a transnational culture that is globally interwoven. Finally acknowledging this complex interweaving of cultures and nationalities, the radio reminds us that not all Muslims are fundamentalists or pathological. I am gripped by panic because I am once again living through another era of anti-­Asian violence. Friends are harassed, others detained, deported and in extreme cases, killed, for looking “Middle Eastern.” Sikhs, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians fear for their lives. They live in the shadow of uncertainty as widespread detentions and deportations shape their narrative of citizenship within the United States. The uncanny return of fear for being an inauthentic citizen haunts my days amidst the tragedy of war. Immigrants from Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen and India are kept under surveillance and summoned for FBI/INS questioning with little or no access to proper legal assistance, and often with little or no family and community contact.21 These unfolding events make tangible the challenges of a working democracy within the state’s borders as well as beyond. How do we grapple with the complexity of competing modalities when there is such a deliberate absence of genuine human images to illustrate the multi-­faceted faces of Islam? Certain strains of Islamic culture forbid the circulation of such images, and this absence is easily absorbed into the obscenity of the free market’s reliance on excessive imagery. I think of the colliding of these worlds in architectural terms: the world of vertical steel skyscrapers that obscure the horizon versus the world of pre-­ modern, much more horizontal rubble, devastation and extreme impoverishment in places like Afghanistan. The limits of critical language in adequately addressing the ideological and political complexities beyond the binarism of the good versus bad, Islam versus Judeo-­Christian, etc., haunts the overarching narrative of events after September 11. This is a convergence of multiple modernities in which entirely disparate comprehensions of space and time are fused. Certainly for Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Sikh and other communities within the United States and elsewhere, an imbricated modernity has always been a way of life. These communities struggle to incorporate capitalist notions of consumption along with other social practices of embodiment and being that

120   Periplus fall outside the available public discourse of citizenship and becoming recognized as human in the United States. But now, as South Asian Amer­icans, Arab-­ Amer­icans and Muslim Africans are hauled into jails on the basis of race, as well on the basis of social practices and belief systems that fall outside the purview of what is understood to be “Amer­ican,” the impoverishment of our critical language to fully address the heterogeneity of our sensorial and legal practices is laid bare. Citizenship is reduced to a deducible category as Muslim Amer­icans, Arab and South Asian Amer­icans are harassed across the country. The National Guard eyes me with suspicion and doubt. I am accosted for standing at the barricades around my home. I am gripped by the panic of inauthentic citizenship as I am racially profiled on different occasions. I am reminded that after nearly twenty years in the United States, I am still arriving in America.22

Xiii Paroxysm of visuality For a reader of signs, the blasted third-­century ad Buddhas and bombed Twin Towers converge in a paroxysm of time, space and belief systems. Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and capitalism merge in a brutal staging of prohibition a vertigo of modernity that uses the very logic of its violence    the propulsion of modernist travel and the technology of speed      to capture the global imagination. Unrelated in their manifestations, the two acts mutate into spectacles of protest performances of desire through erasure: destroy that which tantalizes. Verticality and its implications—totemic visuality. The destruction of the two sets of towering structures, one in New York City in September 2001 and one in Bamiyan in March 2001, poses a dilemma for any reader of signs who is critical of the binary interpretations of good versus evil, Christian West versus barbaric non-­West. The bombing of the World Trade Center was a criminal act staged by a transnational terrorist syndicate that has neither national affiliation nor any single cohesive ideology. Demolishing the Buddhas of Bamiyan was part of a local, nationalist conflict involving rival factions and a struggle for reclaiming power in the northern front by the central administration of the Talibani government in Afghanistan under Mullah Omar. The particular destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan was undertaken against local sentiments in the district of Bamiyan against the edict to destroy all signs of a non-­Islamic past. One reading of this move by the central administration of Mullah Omar in Afghanistan was the desire on the part of the government to humiliate the northern

Bamiyan pillage   121 resistance and reduce morale in the resistance building against the central Talibani administration. While unconnected in their impetus to violence, these visually spectacular events read as enactments of envy: vertical epistemologies in tension with the practices of horizontality. They are cosmopolitanism in contention with tradition—the impure present in conflict with an imagined uncontaminated past. They are a radical contemporary Islam in opposition with older traditions of Sunni and Sufi devotion and the invocations of diasporic Islam at the confluence of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and indigenous beliefs emblematic of the silk-­route mendicant town of Bamiyan, whose pre-­Islamic Buddhist roots attest to the provisionality of history as an endeavor in incomplete narratives.23 Overlapping geographies frame the two catastrophes. Transnational locales: Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Riyadh, Kabul, Kandhahar and New York City interweave the dual sets of images.24 The memory of the exploding Buddhas collide against the repetitive projections of the imploding Twin Towers, both dramatic events of invidia, theatricalizing the destruction of hubristic emblems of expansion, one Buddhist, built before the coming of Islam to Bamiyan, and the other, the arrogance of capitalistic logics. These two events underscore the difficulty of reading contemporary events against the syncretic terrain that interlocks cosmologies into impure trajectories: a defunct Buddhism and a reformist Islam at the crossroads of India, China and Central Asia. The codings of these two politically and geographically different moments are bound by the languages of capitalist expansionism and the struggle for resources and power, as much as they are bound by the interconnected codes of prohibition and aggression that inform contesting philosophies of representation. These events present points of convergence that shape sensibilities and produce powerful visual imagery for public consumption. They foreground the multiplicity of visuality—what André Breton calls “the startling coincidences” that crowd the current moment of visual representation in contemporary life.25 This exercise in reading signs is a journey of vulnerability that is best illustrated by taking the A train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Here, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, socialists, anarchists, atheists, capitalists, agnostics, black Israelites, mystics, the delusional and the mad all travel on any given day. Each with the belief that the experiment in democracy is an experiment in learning different vernaculars of the everyday. Each with a hand in the process of trying to imagine a place of contingent, collaborative and civic coexistence.

Notes   1 Charles S. Prebisch, Historical Dictionary of Buddhism (Metuchen, N.J., & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993), 128. The Gandhara region of the northwest India is significant for its art and schools of Buddhism, particularly the Hinayana tradition of the Sarvastivadin School of Buddhism. The first figures of the Buddha began to

122   Periplus appear in the art of the region in the second century b.c.e. Gandhara art was strongly influenced by the Greeks and is sometimes referred to as “Greco-­Buddhist” in style. Contrary to the style of the period, Buddha is depicted as a person in the art work.   2 Frederick W. Bunce, An Encyclopaedia of Buddhist Deities, Demigods, Godlings, Saints and Demons (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1994), Vol. 2, 1025.   3 Jacque Le Goff, “Social Realities and Ideological Codes in the Early Thirteenth Century: An Exemplum By James of Vitry” in The Medieval Imagination (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 185.   4 Herodotus, Book One “Tomyris Swears Revenge” in The Histories (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 127.   5 Herodotus, The Histories, 215.   6 Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: W.W. Norton, 1990), 54.   7 Mauss, The Gift, 56.   8 Mauss, The Gift, 57.   9 Mauss, The Gift, 57. 10 Mauss, The Gift, 59. 11 Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Preface” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 23–25. 12 Madhur Jaffrey, Flavors of India: Classics and New Discoveries (Carol Southern Book Publishers), 1995. 13 Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 14 Mahatma Gandhi, Key to Health (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Mudranalaya, 1948), 19, 24. 15 Thich Nhat Hanh, “Embracing Anger” Riverside Church, New York. September 25, 2001. 16 Euripides, “The Bachae” in Euripides V, The Complete Greek Tragedies, eds. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 175. 17 Paul Ricoeur, “The Wicked God and the ‘Tragic’ Vision of Existence” in The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Beacon Press, 1967). 18 E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1951), 30. 19 Ricoeur, “The Wicked God,” 231. 20 Euripides, “The Bachae” in Euripides V, 182. 21 Information gathered by DRUM, Prison Moratorium Project and Coalition for the Human Rights of Immigrants. 22 Thanks to Jean Rahier for his editorial suggestions. 23 Frances Wood, “The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” in The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 98. Wood notes that Buddhism was introduced to Bamiyan in the third century ad while Islam arrives in the eighth century ad. The Bamiyan sculptures were first attacked by the reign of Mahmud (998–1030), and the town of Bamiyan completely destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1221. The area is rocked by earthquakes, but the Buddhas survived all calamities till February 2001, when they were demolished by the Officers of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue in Kabul whose orders were to destroy all images. 24 The Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed following the edict against idolatry under Islamic Law following the codes of the hadith, to not worship idols or blasphemous anthropomorphic representations. The Talibani interpretation of Islamic Law demanded the destruction of non-­islamic artifacts reminiscent of its pre-­Islamic past that interferes with the codes of Muslim honor and devoutness. The separate and unrelated though spatially connecting issue of the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam by the Al-­Qaeda, linked those sites to both Afghanistan, where

Bamiyan pillage   123 they were based, and New York City, where the bombing suspects were being held downtown along with the first World Trade Center bombing suspects. 25 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972).

Bibliography Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Bunce, Frederick W. An Encyclopaedia of Buddhist Deities, Demigods, Godlings, Saints and Demons. Vol. 2, 1025. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1994. Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951. Euripides. “The Bachae.” In Euripides V, The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Greene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959. Fanon, Frantz. “Colonial War and Mental Disorders.” In The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Gandhi, Mahatma. Key to Health. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Mudranalaya, 1948. Goff, Jacque Le. “Social Realities and Ideological Codes in the Early Thirteenth Century: An Exemplum By James of Vitry.” In The Medieval Imagination. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Herodotus, Book One “Tomyris Swears Revenge.” In The Histories. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Jaffrey, Madhur. Flavors of India: Classics and New Discoveries. Carol Southern Book Publishers 1995. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. London: W.W. Norton, 1990. Prebisch, Charles S. Historical Dictionary of Buddhism. Metuchen, N.J., & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Wicked God and the ‘Tragic’ Vision of Existence.” In The Symbolism of Evil. New York: Beacon Press, 1967. Sartre, Jean-­Paul. “Preface.” In Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Wood, Frances. “The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” In The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.

9 New York Archipelagoes of the unseen

November 2005. On the corner of Duane and Elk Streets off Broadway, cradled between high-­rise government buildings near City Hall in downtown Manhattan, there lies a deepening mound of earth carefully being dug out. It is a deceivingly humble site that conceals the graves of an estimated 20,000 New Yorkers of African descent buried during the seventeenth century outside the walls of colonial New Amsterdam, the small trading post established at the tip of Manhattan by the Dutch West India Trading Company in the early 1600s. Shadow and light etch the contours of this unearthed clump of land, tucked between imposingly tall structures. A quiet corner, the parcel of earth at Duane and Elk Street is the hard fought plot of land granted to the African Amer­ican community of New York City in 2002 after a long and acrimonious fight between the city and black New York. The excavation site commemorates the earliest, and largest, burial ground of African Amer­icans in the United States, discovered by “accident” in 1991 as workers began to excavate the ground in order to erect a government high-­rise near Wall Street.1 These early seventeenth-­century diasporic African men, women and children buried at this site embody the archive of “the becoming human,” as Sylvia Wynter puts it. These first New Yorkers are the material reminders of Edouard Glissant’s abyss of modernity; they are reminders of the long sea journeys that deported Africans to the New World via the Caribbean, Brazil and Curacao to work as slaves for the early trading city of New Amsterdam during the first few centuries of New York’s existence as a colonial city.2 Of different African cultural and linguistic extractions, their cosmologies included indigenous African belief systems, as well as Islam and Christianity.3 As kidnapped peoples who had to endure violent and discontinuous trajectories of dispersal, their manner of arrival lent New Amsterdam’s early colonial cartography its profoundly global visage. Black New Yorkers brought to a nascent New York urbanism a different oceanic mapping invoking the Caribbean, Brazil, Africa, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Their histories of detours, displacements and polyglottic verbal imaginings forced onto the landscape of New York the accountability of a shared historic past, and an intertwined global future. From their moment of arrival onto the island of Mannahatta (the Lenni Lenape name for Manhattan, meaning “land of many hills”), the story of African

New York: archipelagoes of the unseen   125 descent New Yorkers is a story of the rights to the city. These early black New Yorkers brought to the island of Mannahatta perhaps one of Manhattan’s most enduring legacies, the ability to craft one’s own destiny despite the odds, and contribute toward a new syncretic culture. Theirs was not a history of religious persecution or famine; it was not a search for adventure, or the belief in a New World. Instead, it was a journey for the will to live, from a hellish privation and incalculable inhumanity, to a place of resilience. It is this indomitable forgiveness that haunts the earliest historical accounts of these first black inhabitants of New Amsterdam. Their enduring courage, captured through pieces of bone and shard, a child’s torso, a mother’s cradled arm, are a true testament to a metropolitan imagining, as they fought, bought and worked for their freedoms out of the inhumanity of first Dutch, and later British slavery. A remarkable document of this will to forge a new future is the deeding of land to a free black woman, Catelina Anthony, and her husband, Domingo Anthony in 1643. The Dutch used their black residents as a physical barrier between New Amsterdam and Indian territory. Toward this end, black men and women who were prepared to risk their lives for their self respect and sovereignty were allocated property that extended from today’s Chinatown all the way to Greenwich Village.4 The move to broker land ownership by free blacks paved the way for enslaved individuals to petition for freedom. In 1644, eleven black men petitioned for their freedom. Subsequently, nearly thirty farms were deeded to black men and women. This area came to be recognized as “land of the Blacks.” It was also referred to as Negro Coast.5 Early black New Yorkers built the streets and waterfront of New Amsterdam. They built the protective wall that separated New Amsterdam from the Native Amer­icans who still inhabited their deftly stolen island. The wall, built on the backs of black labor, demarcated the northern most borders of the tiny trading city of New Amsterdam and was bookended by Trinity Church on the west side, and the slave auction block at the corner of Wall Street and Pearl Street on the east side. It would become Wall Street, the world’s most important global trading destination, with the slave auction block at its waterfront to herald its claims to global trade. Once British colonial rule took over from the Dutch, African New Yorkers were forbidden from being buried in the city’s cemeteries. They were allowed to be interred in the area designated in the 1600s as the “Negro Burial Ground” which was located outside the city walls.6 The area ascribed as the Negro Burial Ground from the city maps of the seventeenth century now include much of Tribeca, parts of Chinatown and the City Hall area west of Foley Square, a monument that sits on the former Collect Pond, a large pond which made the area swampy and uninhabitable. Marshy and filled with a dankness from slaughterhouse offal and industrial waste, the pond allocated uninhabitable territory to the enslaved and freed Africans who resided on the island. This meant that black New Yorkers—residents of New York, but without the rights to be buried within the city’s walls under colonial British rule—were granted undesirable land outside the city walls for burying their dead.

126   Periplus

Sankofa in Mannahatta The African Burial Ground Memorial in downtown Manhattan is located next to the court houses. It is designed by Rodney Leon, and it anchors the oceanic conjunctures of New York City deep into the mounds of earth around it. Shaped abstractly to create a ship’s mast with the rudder and sail invoking the journey of a slave ship, the green granite monument is the first below ground level national monument in Manhattan.7 Its cool speckled stone, wood and marble contours force the spectator to be part of an apochryphal journey to the New World, huddled between heavy converging structures that remind one of the dungeons of Elmina Castle in Cape Coast, Ghana (a Dutch fort) and of other slave castles from which people of African descent exited to enter the slave ship, but never returned.8 Embedded in the stone wall alongside ecumenical symbols from the Upanishads, African cosmology, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Zoarashtrianism and Taoism, is the Akan symbol of a Sankofa bird. The Sankofa symbol of looking to the past as one navigates the future is a Ghanaian spiritual phrase that traveled to the Americas through the slave trade.9 Etching “Sankofa” onto the walls of the African Burial Memorial, and therefore, into the physiognomic memory of Manhattan, makes the African journey through water resume its rightful place as a founding metaphor for the formation of modern Manhattan, both of the past and in the future.

Hull of remembrance Trauma monuments are peculiar constructions. To capture a violence of epic proportions such as the African Slave Trade is a design challenge compounded by the location of such an undertaking. A literal remembering of the dead is impossible. Disappointment is part of the promise of memorializing. The African Burial Ground Monument embodies the process of healing through the provisional communitarian engagement of a memorial. We are all part of this global history of slavery and indentured labor. Stepping into the entrance to the memorial is to walk through an imaginative threshold of trauma. Cool slabs of granite with water running through creates a momentary isolation. Reflective stones taper above, navigating one toward the deck of the ship, toward the embossed maps of global slave trade etched on the concrete floor. One is propelled forward into a shared hellish past serenely narrated on the curving walls around. It is meditative and disarming to meander amidst the etchings on the perimeter. Water and light create a shadow of stories around the burial site, where gently rising green mounds are the sole testament to its buried denizen’s remains. The monument’s success lies in its intellectual thrust. Visitors are transported physically through a contemplative journey on a ship of passage. Its design concept underscores the water typology of the area. An environmental dialectic is struck between a low-­lying park and government structures, between a

New York: archipelagoes of the unseen   127 c­ emetery of historic import and the transient street it is located on. The monument cites the fact that the Negro Burial Ground arose around a swampy terrain near a fresh water pond famed for its boating pleasures during the mid-­1700s. By the late eighteenth century, the area had degenerated into a fetid collecting pool of contaminated tannery refuse, brewery waste and sewage from the Five Points neighborhood that developed around the pond. This led to the filling up of the pond and the subsequent development of the city over the burial ground. Leon’s monument in cold granite and air, piercing the light through heavy stone hewn darkness, is a moving icon of that most terrible journey into oceanic waters—the Middle Passage to the underworld of slavery that would create New York City. It remains a physical reminder of the social inequities that shaped and continue to structure lives forged of diaspora and dispersal. The spiral of Rodney Leon’s African Burial Ground, whose seven burial mounds deeply challenge us to comprehend the space we are walking through, envelopes us in an oceanic historicity. The self is swept into the cold waters of the aftershock of global slavery, what Tina Campt calls “fugitive futurity.” For Campt, Refusing the impossibility of black futurity in the contemporary moment demands extremely creative forms of fugitivity. Performing the imperiled state of one’s own future … is at once a refusal and an affirmation of one’s capacity to inhabit a future against all odds.10 Campt poses the idea of fugitive futurity with regards to the photographic image: “Some photos are not quiet at all. Some reverberate loudly through the complex multimodal frequencies of black fugitivity and black futurity.”11 Campt’s fugitive futurity sheds a whole new perspective on Rodney Leon’s design for the African Burial Ground. One can hear the “quiet. A quiet hum full of reverb and vibrato. Not always perceptible to the human ear, we feel it more in the throat.”12 Campt’s tactile evocation to listen to the image, to allow for the “quiet frequencies of possibility—the possibility to inhabit a future as unbounded black subjects,” accosts the passerby along Duane Street. It is an audibility of the visual that Campt identifies as foundational to the modern sensibility. In Leon’s design, with its seven burial mounds of over 600 early New Yorkers of African descent, one is imperceptibly, but certainly, drawn into a spiral journey that demands a refusal to be refused.13 The city has to contend with its buried African populations whose hands built the city. Haptic, tactile and sensorially disorienting, Campt identifies the hum of silence as a refusal of the visual. For Campt, in the already globalized world system of imperialism and slavery, embodiment manifests particular self-­inventions of modernity not otherwise accessible in the more privileged spheres of the visual.

Archipelagoes of the unseen At the tip of Manhattan lies a tiny island, Governors Island. Its minuteness belies its imaginary importance. Aboard the ferry that cuts across New York harbor in

128   Periplus the icy cold wind of early January across Buttermilk Channel, I watch a swath of the New York archipelago fan out before the receding boat. Roosevelt Island, City Island, Ward Island, Randolph Island and further on, Rikers Island, distend up the East River coast. The treacherous Verranzano Narrows Bridge frames the southern end of the spectacular scene in the prismatic sun. The Atlantic shimmers in the distance. I jot the word Cochin in my field notes. For me, this boat ride is the link between the Malabar and New York. It is a seafaring link of boats traversing to get from one island to another across an intercoastal waterway. At the tip of Manhattan, Governors Island dramatically bears the scars of the first ruins of colonization. The plaque documenting the Islands’ change in ownership, from Lenape territory to Dutch possession, is decorated with windmills. Governors Island was sold for two axe heads and a hand full of white beads, reads the plaque. A shiver courses through my body when I read these words. They are the grim reminder of the hard lessons of colonial deal making. An island for a hand full of beads. Writing about Medieval Europe’s production of spatial organization, Michel Foucault identifies the leper and the plague as two logics that created the modern sensibility of the systematized ordering of society.14 What was normal was spatialized in relation to what was out of the norm. In New York, the archipelagic nature of the eighteenth-­century imagination perpetuated structures of isolation and quarantine, modes of hiding populations within plain sight amidst its numerous islands. New York’s agglomeration of wetlands, sandbars, barrier islands, mudflats and rocky protuberances activated an unplanned fluid urbanism.15 Shaped by the dense interface of water and land, New York’s coastal development was a disconnected series of archipelaegic planning strategies over 400 years, organized around making unwanted populations disappear within plain sight of the densest city in the world. These modes of containment were social engineering experiments situated across the city’s numerous smaller islands lacing Manhattan’s shores.16 Prisons, asylums, cemeteries, homes for the destitute, orphanages, almshouses and hospitals for contagious diseases like small pox and yellow fever—all were located away from the density of the thriving metropolis. Over time, New York morphed into a peripatetic necropolis. A place where one walks through former histories of biopolitical management. Nowhere is this sensation of a peripatetic necropolis more visceral than walking along Gansevoort Street in what today is the West Village District of New York. One is immediately accosted by ghosts of historic Sapokanikan, the Lenape village that had been situated around a cove, now traced by Gansevoort Street. Walking downtown along Greenwich Street, one arrives at the edge of the sixteenth-­century Lenape island of Mannahatta. Strolling along the 1609 water’s edge that captured Henry Hudson’s awe, is a slow process of engagement with a lost history of the Munsee at one of their larger settlements along the verdant island. Writing about the Ojibwe’s sentiments of their forced removal away from Madeline Island in Canada, Winona La Duke records: “We left that island with the understanding that we would never hold lodge there again.”17 Her words echo along the cobblestoned streets: “but we never forgot

New York: archipelagoes of the unseen   129 our place.” These words resonate with the violent history that is Manhattan’s island memory, as descendants of the early Mannahatta now reside far away from their rightful home, on reservations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario.19 The memory of a peripatetic knowledge of island habitation has continued to shape the unconscious becoming of life across the New York archipelago. To walk the necropolis is to be actively immersed in a decolonial methodology of reenvisioning what lies below the surface of ecological meaning. One has to look for the buried traces of former ecologies. Seek the filled-­in rivers, and the paved rivulets. Campt’s technique of ontological excavation through listening to the erased spaces of possibility is useful to cultivate as a practice of peripatetic knowledge making. In their exhaustive research documenting the rich archaeological traces of a millennia of Native Amer­ican life around New York City, Anne-­Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall have painstakingly unearthed traces of the decimated indigenous past over which layers of modernity now coexist.20 At downtown Manhattan’s Stadt Huys Block; on Governors Island; along Staten Island’s Port Mobil; at Wards Point, New Jersey; around the Collect Pond of Manhattan’s Chinatown—here are the artifacts and chemical residues of Lenape, Canarsie and Munsee habitations that fill the archipelago with what Campt calls, “quiet soundings.”21 Listening to the quiet soundings of the archipelago’s historic past is an invaluable tool for a decolonial understanding of New York’s necropolitan imaginary. 18

Islands of the forgotten Over forty islands shape the New York archipelago. To walk across New York’s island ecology is to constantly engage with the materiality of settler colonialism. The ghosts of genocide haunt as one takes the boat from one island to another, demanding, as Macarena Gomez-­Barris puts it, that we “shift how we see … by reckoning with the thick opacity of what lies below the water’s surface.” Approaching the task of thinking through New York’s transforming archipelaegic consciousness, I am spurred by Gomez-­Barris’s methodological challenge to find submerged viewpoints, “ways to see what lies within the ecologies around us, and about how to perceive those things that are not usually available to the naked eye.”22 Circumnavigating Manhattan’s ring of small islands, an entire epistemology of forgotten islands rise to the surface: Roosevelt Island, North Brother Island, Ward Island, Randall’s Island, Rikers Island, Hart Island, Governors Island, the Far Rockaways. These formerly ghostly islands were presences at once visible but discursively hidden from the consciousness of the anchoring big island of Manhattan. Strung around Manhattan’s peripheries across the harbor and up the East River, these smaller islands fringe the jewel in the New York estuary, functioning as strategic biopolitical enclaves of contaminants. Ward Island has two psychiatric hospitals, numerous homeless shelters, cemeteries and a wastewater treatment center. Rikers Island is a system of prisons with no access to the

130   Periplus public. Hart Island is a cemetery for indigents and the urban poor. Governors Island was a military facility for over 300 years, and was closed to the public until 2002. The Rockaways were originally used to house the urban poor in large public housing projects built by Robert Moses, with no amenities and poor connectivity to the mainland islands of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Originally purchased in 1637 from the Munsee Indians by the Governor General of New Netherlands, Wouter Van Twiller, for his personal property, many of the smaller islands accrued marginal status as destinations for the unwanted of Manhattan. Outside the public eye, after independence from the British these smaller islands mutated from floating mud flats to military islands to private farms and informal potter’s fields. Propelled by their necropolitical importance to Manhattan, the uneasy interrelationality between these small islands generated distinctive structural linkages. For one, these small islands, borne out of a culture of neglect from the “mainland” of the island of Manhattan, shared a coastal topography—infrastructurally as well as hydrologically—that was closer to a marine wilderness. The particular estuarine environment of salt water and fresh water created distinctive currents that made the waters around some of the islands treacherous to navigate for swimmers or small boats, adding to their isolation. Roosevelt Island is such a case in point, with strong currents swiveling around it. It consequently became an ideal prison location. Other small islands neighboring Roosevelt became accompanying locations for internment, segregation, incarceration, quarantine, social engineering and punishment in all their brutish informality of the eighteenth century. Rikers Island remains the most notorious one. Prominently situated as a land mass adrift between two of the densest islands of the early twentieth century, Manhattan and Brooklyn, Roosevelt Island developed a distinctive visual ecology of invisibility. This, despite its proximity to the two prosperous islands. Formerly known as Blackwells Island, and Welfare Island, Roosevelt Island is etched in the minds of older New Yorkers as the island of the forgotten. It contained a notorious prison, an infamous mental asylum, The Octagon and James Renwick’s Small Pox Hospital. North of the island, there remains the melancholic, windswept landscape of the former psychiatric hospital which held a large number of women. The aura of its sinister reputation for conducting some of the earliest shock therapy treatments and lobotomies, particularly on resistant women, permeates the moody terrain of windswept red brick and gray-­teal river. The island’s dark, eighteenth-­century history of inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, along with its history of housing a penitentiary and the city’s quarantine for small pox patients, kept its presence along the East River a mystery for much of the last 150 years.23 Of the small islands around New York, Castle Clinton was one of the first geological islands to be designated a place of isolation. Originally a rocky promontory equipped for a military battery, it was quickly transformed to become the first immigration depot and place for quarantining immigrants who were deemed infectious upon arrival from the old world. Geologically separated from the mainland of Manhattan by water, Castle Clinton’s function as the island of

New York: archipelagoes of the unseen   131 immigration and quarantine marked its biopolitical function as container of migrants, pollutants and the sick. Nowadays, these small islands are deeply enmeshed within the archipelagic consciousness of the city; they are hovering presences along the East River and the New York harbor. And yet, most of them loom silently as unmarked sentinels of a watery world that protects the larger land mass from the grimmer realities of life in the city, which they encompass. Their psychologically remote yet proximate land masses are gradually transforming into prime real estate, with dramatically shifting futures. Following the pattern in which Castle Clinton’s relationship to Manhattan developed, other islands around Manhattan transposed into a graded archipelago of disappearance. The farther away the island was from downtown Manhattan’s visual span, the more hopeless was the social cause defining the island. In this unconscious structuring of the necropolitan imaginary across the Hudson River, the once pristine but soon forbidding long sliver of Roosevelt Island is the most notorious case—it is an island of ghosts transforming into one of the more desirable places to live.

Walking the archipelagic necropolis Ward Island, Hart Island, Rikers Island, Randolph’s Island are all islands with histories of quarantined communities and graveyards of the dispossessed. They bear the burden of their necropolitan histories through their ecological topographies. Now, waterlogged and low lying, many of these islands are provisional mudflats whose livability has been under threat as sea levels rise. The barrier islands of the Far Rockaways are another case in point where the history of the dead converges with the dreams and worries of the living. The Rockaways were one of the last hold outs of the Canarsee Indians against the Dutch colonizers during the seventeenth century. At the time geographically far away from Dutch New Amsterdam, the Canarsee clung to their disappearing land longest along its outer edges, finally selling the island in 1685 to one John Palmer.24 Along the Rockaways, an ecology of thanatos courses its way through the landscape, licking the decrepit sea-­worn walls on one street, and elsewhere, washing the shoreline’s edges along the beach. At Breezy Point, an entire community was destroyed by the storm fires of Hurricane Sandy. Large swaths of the Jamaica Bay and the Rockaway islands lie waterlogged and corroded by mold with great public health impact. The Rockaways are a living example of precarity and risk along barrier islands. Hugging the Rockaway coastline, devastated coastal communities are still struggling to restore normality to their radically altered lives after the fury and storm surge damage of Hurricane Sandy. Provisionally protected by imported dunes that have been replaced twice at great cost by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Rockaways will be the test case for New York’s grappling with climate refugees. Do they stay or do they move?

132   Periplus Not far from the Rockaway barrier islands are the lesser-­known floating cemeteries of Hart Island and Ward Island, Governors Island and Roosevelt Island, Rikers Island and Lower Manhattan, all islands within the New York archipelago. At Hart Island the unknown remain buried while at Ward Island the disinterred remains of indigents from Manhattan’s burial sites, are laid to rest. Governors Island is a forgotten Lenape terrain whose indigenous artifacts trace a thousand-­year history of occupation, while at Roosevelt Island the disturbed and forgotten souls of disease and madness were laid to rest. Together, these sites comprise an aesthetic of thanatos, where the voraciously alive ghost the entrails of the dead. Burial grounds across the New York archipelago articulate a hidden emotive life. They underlie the banality of everyday life in the city. To live in New York is to walk among the dead. New York’s archipelago is a perpetually transforming necropolis, whose palimpsest ecology has never been more endangered or more protected. Each of these islands instructively presents an ecological lesson on how death, nature and urban artifice converge to shape environmental futures.

Notes   1 Joyce Hanson and Gary McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence: The Story of New York’s African Burial Ground (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998).   2 Ric Burns and James Sanders with Lisa Ades, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 2003), 9.   3 Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, Slavery In New York (New York: The New Press, 2005), 40, 41.   4 Hanson and McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence, 26.   5 Hanson and McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence, 26.   6 Hanson and McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence, 17, 18, 33, 34.   7 The World Trade Center Memorial Museum is below ground. It marks the lives of 2,752 dead.   8 Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).   9 Robert Ferris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1984). 10 Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 11 Campt, Listening, 116. 12 Campt, Listening, 45. 13 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). 14 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). 15 May Joseph, Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 16 Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide (Vermont: The Countryman Press, 1996). 17 Winona La Duke, Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines In the Battle for Environmental Justice (Ponsford: Spotted Horse Press, 2016), 10. 18 Duke, Chronicles, 9. 19 Robert S. Grumet, First Manhattans: A History of the Indians of Greater New York (Norman: University of Okalahoma Press, 2011), 3.

New York: archipelagoes of the unseen   133 20 Anne-­Marie Cantewell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 21 Tina Campt, Listening. 22 Macarena Gomez-­Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 23 Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-­House (New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887). 24 Vincent Seyfried, “Far Rockaway” in The Encyclopedia of New York, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1995).

Bibliography Berlin, Ira and Leslie M. Harris. Slavery In New York. New York: The New Press, 2005. Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-­House. New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887. Burns, Ric, James Sanders and Lisa Ades. New York: An Illustrated History. New York: Knopf, 2003. Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Cantewell, Anne-­Marie and Diana diZerega Wall. Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Duke, Winona La. Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines In the Battle for Environmental Justice. Ponsford: Spotted Horse Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Gomez-­Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Hanson, Joyce and Gary McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence: The Story of New York’s African Burial Ground. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Joseph, May. Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. Seitz, Sharon and Stuart Miller. The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide. Vermont: The Countryman Press, 1996. Seyfried, Vincent. “Far Rockaway.” In The Encyclopedia of New York, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1995. Thompson, Robert Ferris. Flash of the Spirit (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1984).

10 Deciphering the Indian Ocean

I wander the reviving swamps and mudflats of New York City with my urban planning students, disinterring the hydrological past between painstakingly restored marshes and berms of native flora. Since the cyclopean storm of 2012, Hurricane Sandy, the coastal microclimates of New York are numerous. It is as though the deluge of monstrous waves that violent year unearthed many logics and differing marine landscapes in its devastating wake. Contours of the last floodings still rot the boardwalks of Red Hook and Graves End bay. A foreboding courses the urban landscape like an aftershock of neurological imbalance. The water is right there, at the edge of my road, or a few blocks down with nothing but fallen angels to still its merciless torrent. It is this overwhelming sense of ecological unease, both historical and climatological, that draws forth a preoccupation with an oceanic precarity. What is the history of these oceans that surrounds the archipelago of New York? That embraces the intercoastal waterways of the Eastern seaboard of the United States? After the gargantuan cyclones of the last decade, how might we embrace the “injunction to rematerialize our belonging to the world,” as Bruno Latour puts it? How might we embrace our trembling in the face of the shifting coastlines and eroding beaches on which we stand, here at the water’s edge, in Manhattan, Boston, the Carolinas, Florida and New Orleans? What forms of “historicization,” to use Latour’s term, can our coming to ecological awakening activate?1 An historic hubris decided there was no need to answer that persistent inquiry for centuries. Now, a renewed urgency of locality, vulnerability and a new materiality of oceanic anima draws attention to the very sea we have overused and cast aside as an epistemological casualty of our shortsighted modernity of terra firma. The sea is the underlying assurance with which much of contemporary urbanity has pursued its claims to land use. While the borderless ocean, in all its benevolent wisdom, absorbed our greed, we destroyed what looked like limitless earth. Now we have exhausted our limited knowledge and are staring at the inconceivably terrifying scenario of an angry, heating ocean whose cooling mechanisms are exponentially activated as temperatures rise and the ice caps melt. As Sylvia Wynter instructs, it is a liminal environmental moment of deciphering the coastal Anthropocene—of reading its soundings, its uneven edges,

Deciphering the Indian Ocean   135 its extensive meandering coastline. Our education fails our ecological need. We must use the tools we have to begin a close read of the signs of devastation, contamination, erosion and decimation of the marine biosphere. We must also embrace the reality that as a species, we are already engulfed by the process of ecological thinking. “If we think the ecological thought” writes Timothy Morton, “We must take a new path, into the vast mesh of interconnection. Who lives there?”2 Deciphering the Indian Ocean’s impacts and influences has been the aesthetic project of this book—the making actual of unknowable materialities through stories. I want to offer here a work of praxis that explores that place between what we know and what is dredged up in the gaps of the archive. It is an exercise in instinct. In “Metalogue: What is an Instinct?” Gregory Bateson offers: Daughter:  Daddy, what is an instinct? Father:  An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle. DAUGHTER:  But what does it explain? FATHER:  Anything-­almost anything at all. Anything you want

it to explain.3

Engaging with an instinctual response to the exacerbating climatological scenario is part of the language of fragile terrains. “Environmental ecology” writes Felix Guattari means to “radically decentre social struggles and ways of coming to one’s own psych.… The question of mental ecology may emerge anywhere, at any moment, beyond fully constituted ensembles on the order of the individual and the collective.”4 Guattari’s articulation of a mental ecology as an eruption of necessity, a praxis that crops up out of context, opens up the space of ecological engagement. Following Guattari’s charge, Bruno Latour identifies this need for praxis as “facing Gaia,” the political and scientific threshold where we humans as a species find ourselves. Latour identifies this threshold as the period during which a paralysis of thought ensued. It is a vast mesh of interconnectivity networked through the history of colonization. According to Latour, this regression of thought has led us to the place we are today—where the “ecological questions drive us mad.”5 For Latour, it is our closeness to the period of the sixteenth century, a period made so unstable by the process of colonial onslaught and so catastrophic for the colonized, that makes our time both precarious and optimistic. For Latour, it is the shock of discovering, “new ways of being on Earth that destabilizes us, perhaps, but that could make us just as inventive,” that once again situates our species on the precipice of a different kind of cataclysm, both ontological and material.6 What raised my consciousness to the moment of “facing Gaia” was the dire state of water ecologies in Kerala precipitated by the view from my mother’s balcony in Cochin. Piles of garbage fringe the serene scene of ochre green water stretching languorously toward the horizon. Styrofoam, cloth, plastic, wood, metal. Giant water hyacinths choke the shoreline, struggling to find flow and

136   Periplus balance in the polluted waterway. The stench wafts through the sunny, stunning light as a warning odor of anthropogenic blight. There is nothing subtle about the rapacious consumption of sealife along India’s coasts. The many capacities the ocean sustains include the sewage and garbage which accompany fishing, cooking, cleaning, bathing, drinking, washing, irrigating and entertaining. It was a shocking revelation that in a city plagued by incessant flooding, there is no potable water available. People have to buy drinking water. There is not enough water to sustain the population’s needs, even as the city is deluged by too much water. This terrifying, unlyrical scenario of no water in a coastal town submerged by flooding, whose shoreline is the current aquatic landfill for toxic waste, is the actuality of the anthropocenic imaginary. As a symptom of the ocean’s acidity, Morton’s mesh metaphor works tragically well in this fishing port. Poisoned fish, fuel contaminated scenic backwaters, and escalating cancers now comprise the quotidian experience of Cochin’s idyllic charms. The dystopic view spanning the barrier islands of Dutch and Portuguese colonization and their vestiges, intensifies the epistemic shock of “facing Gaia” and needing to find a praxis. It raises challenging environmental questions of ecological mutation that are embedded in the sedimentations of soil, concrete, mud and plankton. It is the moment of staring at the vortex of anthropogenic accountability. Here, at the tip of India, the interconnectivity between New York’s oceanic legacies and those of the Indian Ocean merge in confluence. It is the commingling of what Gregory Bateson calls “mental ecologies” across forgotten trajectories. The ecological shock of facing our shared species’ futures. In this virtual space of comparative knowledges, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the South China Seas and the Pacific Ocean become connected to North America’s Eastern seaboard, as well as to the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the Jamaica Bay of New York. Across distended seascapes, Timothy Morton’s invocation of the mesh of interconnection makes accessible the question: “who lives there?” The case of the Indian Ocean as a sea of potentialities, possibilities and actualities is the new work of the mesh that is beginning to be undertaken. Ecological thought, writes Timothy Morton, has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion.… It has to do with amazement, open-­mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion, and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, iron, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing.… It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity … It has to do with coexistence.7 The word coexistence encapsulates the Indian Ocean, the densest sea agglomeration of coexistence across continents, religions and geographies.8 Coexistence, however, also implies predatory economics, and currently, the Indian Ocean is certainly enmeshed in global commercial and governance implications. The

Deciphering the Indian Ocean   137 2018 renaming of the US Pacific Command as the US Indo-­Pacific Command has foregrounded the growing importance of the Indian Ocean to US military interests. While the Indian Ocean has always been a US security interest, China’s aggressive sea presence there has exacerbated the rising pertinence of the region to US power relations. Interestingly, the renaming of US security concerns has been couched in cultural terms: “from Bollywood to Hollywood, and from penguins to polar bears.”9 In the face of such escalating vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean, there is an urgency to produce alternative knowledges from the ground, outside military and commercial circuits. Timothy Morton’s volatile conception of ecological thought allows for the disappearances and the gaps of documentation that the Indian Ocean poses as an archive of the Anthropocene. His notion of the “mesh” opens up a scalar vision for thinking about anthropogenic accountability: “Ecological thought permits no distance. Thinking interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between ‘over here’ and ‘over there,’ and more fundamentally, the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow boundaries between inside and outside. Thinking interdependence involves difference.”10 Morton’s capacious elucidation of ecological thought as a place of shrinking distance and absorbing difference is a daunting goal from the perspective of South Asia. The language of climate crisis, with its roster of shared concerns around mitigating climate change, developing internationally binding agreements and projecting habitat threat to coastal areas and low-­lying islands around the world, opens the prospect of a shared set of values—albeit with contentious understandings of how to move forward. Within the national construct, these conversations get entangled in religious and sectarian investments, fueled by political stakeholders. This is particularly the case around the ontology of water and the role India’s coastal waterfronts play within the larger map of climatological infrastructure redesign. In her book Water Wars, Vandana Shiva outlines the elaborate water histories that inform South Asia. What is most striking in Shiva’s analysis is the predominance of rivers as the provenance of water ontologies in India’s dominant water discourse. The coast appears only as the site of climate crisis. The great rivers of India—the Ganges, the Yamuna, the Kaveri, the Narmada and the Brahmaputra— occupy ontologically defining roles in the national and local imaginaries of South Asia. They are Hindu deities with the powers of gift, absolution and redemption; pilgrims come to them to have their spirits purified and cleansed.11 Rivers bear the burden of sustenance and abundance in the heartlands of India. The internal-­looking Subcontinental imaginary in the post-­independence era is foregrounded by the evocative intensity of its great riverine societies. This river-­ based historicity is propelled by its powerful metropolitan centers, located at the confluence of the major rivers. The cultural identities of these rivers have evolved organically, but over time they are are harnessed into the nationalist ideology. In contrast, the Southern coastal imaginaries have remained peripheral to the national ideological project. This is partly because many of the sites of pilgrimage along the Coromandel and Malabar coastline are Christian and

138   Periplus Muslim sacred spaces which are located in ancient fishing villages along the seashore, such as Velankani, Muziris, Kodungoloor, Cochin, Panjim. Consequently, unpacking the historicity of India’s coastal imaginaries in the context of the comparative oceanic histories of larger species formations, such as the broader Indian Ocean basin or the Bay of Bengal littoral, is the task of ecological rethinking. It is the kind of thinking that needs to happen as a step toward climate adaptation techniques.12 The entrenched religious wars of South Asia that have been politically stoked to inflame the debilitating climate crisis sweeping the country is a terrifying added toxicity in an already impacted social and ecological system. In this respect, the ocean knowledges from India’s geographical South offer an ecumenical optimism whose fragility is already being incited by the Hindu Far Right. In the age of Gaia, India desperately needs to steer its incendiary fundamentalism away from climate politics. Along the Malabar region, a new species centric and secular oceanic identity is emerging. One can observe this across the Kerala coast where an ecological consciousness, shaped by the 1994 tsunami and aggravating climate anomalies of the last two decades, has opened up nascent awareness of an oceanic ecology in crisis. At the local level, it manifests at the level of communities that have been washed away by storm surges and cyclones along the coast, or have been devastated by fishing accidents at sea, which tragically happen all too frequently. At the macro level, this is registered in terms of mitigation and coastal readaptation for floods, changing fishing practices and the challenges of coping with a rapidly eroding coastal shoreline.13 To use Hau’Ofa’s formulation, increasingly, from the perspective of the Malabar Coast, the Indian Ocean is “a sea of islands.”14 To live along the Subcontinental Indian coast is already to be engaged with the island structures around the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean littoral. Atmospheric turbulence, ocean winds and the patterns of sea currents from as far away as the Antarctic and the Indonesian straits affect the climate variances of coastal India and the East coast of Africa simultaneously. The urban poor along coastal India are painfully aware of their precarity in a resilient, climatological sense. As climate refugees and climate soldiers in the first line of shock—whether confronting monsoons or monster storms—makes them a new demographic of ecologists with a deep understanding of the sea on terms that are unprecedented. The shared vulnerability of a warming planet across the low-­lying regions of the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean has produced a historically new Indian Ocean affect. This is particularly the case as communities from the Sunderbans of Bangladesh flee their sinking habitat for Srilanka, the Maldives and Southern India. As we contemplate the dire scenarios of wind and sea, which, as a structuring concept, the Indian Ocean helps to concretize, there is a wide arena of experiences, sensibilities, shared histories and shared anxieties that can best be reduced to a species scale of understanding. As we jointly face Gaia and US/ China interests, it is with great urgency that this new awareness is emerging.

Deciphering the Indian Ocean   139

Notes   1 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 219.   2 Timothy Morton, Ecological Thought (Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 38.   3 Gregory Batesons, “Metalogue: What is an Instinct?” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1972), 38.   4 Felix Guattari, Three Ecologies (London: Continuum, 2000), 35.   5 Latour, Facing, 190.   6 Latour, Facing, 190.   7 Morton, Ecological Thought, 2.   8 Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).   9 Scott Neuman, “In Military Name Change, U.S. Pacific Command Becomes U.S. Indo-­Pacific Command” National Public Radio, May 31, 2018. 10 Morton, Ecological Thought, 39. 11 Vandana Shiva, “The Sacred Waters” in Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002). 12 Pamila Gupta, “Island-­ness in the Indian Ocean,” in Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). 13 Soumya Dutta, Soumitra Ghosh, Shankar Gopalakrishnan, C.R. Bijoy and Hadida Yasmin, eds., Climate Change and India: Analysis of Political Economy and Impact (New Delhi: Daanish Books, 2013). 14 Epeli Hau’Ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6:1 (Spring 1994): 147–161.

Bibliography Dutta, Soumya, Soumitra Ghosh, Shankar Gopalakrishnan, C.R. Bijoy and Hadida Yasmin, eds. Climate Change and India: Analysis of Political Economy and Impact. New Delhi: Daanish Books, 2013. Epeli Hau’Ofa. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (Spring 1994): 147–161. Guattari, Felix. Three Ecologies. London: Continuum, 2000. Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Naylor Pearson. Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Morton, Timothy. Ecological Thought. Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Neuman, Scott. “In Military Name Change, U.S. Pacific Command Becomes U.S. Indo-­ Pacific Command.” National Public Radio, May 31, 2018. Sheriff, Abdul. Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Shiva, Vandana. “The Sacred Waters.” In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

Index

Abu-Lughod, Janet 82n2, 98 Aceh 21–22, 24, 78 Afghanistan 80, 95, 119–120, 122 Africa 2, 22–24, 32, 34–35, 37, 51, 53, 57–58, 63–65, 68–69, 80, 91–92, 94–96, 106–107, 114–115; and Asian colonies 106; belief systems 31, 124; burial ground in downtown New York 2; colonial ports 25; continent 34, 51 African Americans 67, 124 African Burial Ground Memorial 126–127 African slave trade 48–49, 54, 64, 84–85, 95, 126–127, 132–133 Africans 7–8, 32–36, 65, 67, 77, 79, 90, 94–95, 106, 115, 119, 124; and Arab cultures 119; in Bangalore and Madras 94; deported 124; enslaved and freed 125; and Muslims 119–120 Agamben, Giorgio xii Algeria 52, 62, 64, 67, 71, 112, 114–115 Algiers 52–53, 58, 61, 63, 69, 112 Almeida, Francisco 19 Amsterdam 22, 24, 26, 61, 67, 78 Andaman Islands 30–31 Anthony, Domingo 125 anthropocene 1, 43, 134–135, 137 Arab-Americans, and Muslim Africans 120 Arabian Sea 6, 37, 78–79, 95, 136, 138 Arabs 1, 7–8, 31, 34–36, 47, 77, 79, 88, 96, 98, 115, 120; black 119; and South Asians fearing for their lives 119 Aragon, Louis 68 archipelagoes 4, 7, 17, 78–79, 82, 124–125, 127, 129, 131, 133 archives 9, 23, 33, 37, 40–41, 44, 72, 124, 135, 137 aromatic food 115

Artaud, Antonin 62 artifacts 53, 122, 129, 132 arts 3, 53–55, 59, 62, 65–66, 71–72, 103, 121–122; legitimate 53; martial 78; visual 53 Arusha Declaration 86–87, 90 Asad, Muhammad 91, 97n11 Asia 9, 12, 16, 24, 26, 28, 32, 35, 37, 51, 53, 64–65, 82–83, 97–98, 122–123; and African colonial ports 25; cities of 100, 102; classes in post-colonial Tanzania 90; colonies 106; communities 90; maritime economies 78 Auschwitz 63 avant-garde 53–55, 57–59, 61–62, 64–66, 69–73; aesthetic 68; contestory 57; coterie 64; experience 53; genius 62; global 68; hegemonic 57; historical 37, 50–51; movements 71; political 72; projects 64 backwaters 18, 136 Bagamoyo (East Africa slave port) 37, 47, 84–86 Bamiyan sculptures 111, 120–122, 122n23, 122 Bangalore 51, 93–94, 97, 109 Bangkok 79–81 barbarism 60, 62, 67 Barthes, Roland 64 Bataille, George 57, 66 Batavia 18, 21–24, 26, 36, 78 Bateson, Gregory 135–136 Battuta, Ibn 19, 36, 77 Baudelaire, Charles 53, 55, 57, 64 Bay of Bengal 25, 79, 138 Bengal 25, 48–49, 79, 138 Benjamin, Walter 58–59, 108 biopower 1, 44, 46, 116

Index   141 bodies 3, 6, 10, 12, 16, 51, 54–55, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67, 113, 115, 118; burnt 114; cleaved 18; expansive 40; healthy 88; migrant 68; modern 55; people’s 102 Bolghatty Island 78–79 bombings 94, 120, 122 Bosphorus 31–32 Braudel, Fernand 10, 40 Brazil 23–24, 124 Breton, André 64, 66, 121 Buddhas 18, 110–111, 121–122 Buddhism 31, 33–34, 93, 111, 120–122, 126 Buddhists 18, 33–34, 47, 77, 95, 119, 121 al-Bukhari, Sahih 91–92 Buñuel, Luis 63 burial sites 36, 126–127, 132 Cabo de Tormentoso (Cape of Good Hope) 22, 33–36, 51–52 Campt, Tina 38, 127, 129, 132–133 Cape of Good Hope (Cabo de Tormentoso) 22, 33–36, 51–52 Cape Point 34–35, 38 Cape Town 17, 22–24, 26, 34–36 Cape Verde Islands 23, 114 Caribbean 44–46, 84, 124 Caribbean Sea 44–46, 136; and Asian colonized nationals in Paris 106; in Césaire’s work 45; and North Africa 65 cartographers 23–24 cartography 23, 38–39, 65, 79 Castello of Lisbon 22, 37 Castoriadis, Cornelius 57 Césaire, Aimé 5, 38, 59–60, 63, 65–66, 70–71, 86, 106 Césaire, Suzanne 44–46, 48, 69 Ceylon (changed name to Sri Lanka in 1972) 31, 37 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4, 7, 10–11 China 3, 32, 34, 81, 90, 137; and Central Asia 121; and the spread of Buddhism 34; Yenan experiments and reforms in 90 Chinatown 125 Chinese 8, 31, 77, 79, 81, 88, 94, 115; fishing nets 80–81; invading 105; proletarianization 43; technologies 8 Christianity 31, 106, 120–121, 124, 126 Christians 7, 18, 32, 34, 47, 77, 93, 121, 137 cities 18, 24–25, 35, 37, 53–55, 77–80, 82, 99–103, 105–107, 111, 113, 124–125, 127–128, 131–132, 136; ancient 101;

captured 23; colonial 79, 102, 106–107, 124; decaying 37; medieval 101–102; metropolitan 106; post-revolutionary 102 Cixous, Helene 41 Clifford, James 67 climate change 5 climate crisis 137–138 Clough, Patricia 44–45 coastal cultures 8, 16 coastal regions 7, 16, 18, 34, 137 Cochin 4, 11, 17, 23–26, 32, 36, 77–83, 100, 135, 138; and Cape Town 24; contemporary 80; idyllic charms of 136; and Mattanchery Island 37; and Vypin Island 26 colonial 22, 63, 71–72, 77, 80, 91, 100–101, 107, 125; administrators 37; ambitions 96; architecture 107; archives 9, 33; emigrants 106–107; expansionism 26, 33, 64; exploitation 102; occupations 45, 100; oppression 32, 106; pillage 31, 114; port cities 8, 78; violence 15, 33, 35, 68; wars 115 colonialism 1, 5, 54, 59–60, 63, 85, 90–91, 112, 115; history of 102, 115; settler 46, 129 Communist Party of India 90, 96–97 communities 4, 19, 89, 93, 95, 107, 119, 131, 138; aboriginal 3; coastal 131; Indian 89; monolithic 95; quarantined 131 Constantinople 31–32, 34; see also Istanbul CPIM see Communist Party of India Crutzen, Paul 1 cultural nationalism 87 cultures 3, 8, 15, 32, 47, 78, 81–82, 89–90, 92–93, 95, 112, 114, 119, 130; amalgamated 7; hybrid 47; new syncretic 125; physical 88; primitive 2; small island 46; transnational 119; violent 26 currents 8–9, 40; converging 95; distinctive 130; inverting 35; ocean 22, 34, 138; treacherous 35 Dadaists 65–66 Dakar 61, 68–69, 101–102, 105–106 Dalí, Salvador 58, 63 Dar es Salaam 1–2, 17, 21, 36, 47, 78–81, 84–86, 88–91, 94–96, 101–102, 109, 122 Das Gupta, Ashin xi

142   Index Davis, Angela 88 death 33, 36, 46, 64, 108, 114, 117, 132; graceless 103; impending 54; violent 117 deciphering 46–47, 134–135, 137, 139; practice of 47–49; process of 47 decolonial 1, 6, 16–17, 23, 41, 44, 46, 57, 85, 133; avant-garde 68; histories 4, 46; practices 50; praxis 17 Delacroix, Eugène 52–53, 57, 112 democracy 64, 116, 119, 121 Deshpande, Aruna 2–3 Dias, Bartolomeu 34–37, 51–52 diasporic Islam 121 Discourse on Colonialism 5, 63 Djebar, Assia 52–53 drinking 54, 95, 112–113, 115–116, 136 Dubai 79–80 Duberman, Martin 68 Dunham, Katharine 64, 69 Dutch East India Company 21, 23–25 Dutch urban planning 8, 77–78 Duval, Jeanne 64 East Africa 15, 36–37, 43, 67, 81, 84, 93–96, 119; and Arabia 19; and South Asia 95 Eastern Indian Ocean 19, 25, 42 Eastern Islands 78 eating cultures 95, 112, 115–116 ecological thinking 135–137 ecologies 8, 116, 129, 131, 135–136, 139 enlightenment discourse 46 environmenting xiii, 6, 8 Europe 1, 3–4, 17, 24, 30, 32, 34, 51, 53–54, 56, 60, 62–64, 67–69, 82, 114 European 50, 53, 58, 63, 65; borders 52; colonization 1, 86; fascism 44; travelers 57 excavations 2, 9, 19, 41, 44–45, 47, 124, 129 families 20, 79–80, 84, 94, 119 family homes 20, 34 Fanon, Frantz 59–61, 64, 66, 68, 71–73, 105, 107, 109, 114–115, 122–123 Far Rockaways 129, 131, 133 fasting 92–93, 115–116 Ferreira, Denise 4 Fic, Victor M. 97n8 Fodeba, Keita 68 food 16, 19–20, 92, 97, 113–117; aromatic 115; and cuisine 82–83, 97–98; famine 81; pillage 110, 114–115; practices 115; traditions 81, 95; vendors 104

Fort Aguado 37 Fort Cochin 15, 17, 23, 25, 78–79 Fort Cranganore (Kodungallur) 37 Fort-de-France 68, 106 Fort Jesus 15, 17, 37 Fort New Orange (Fort New Orange) 78 Fort Thangassery 15, 20–21 forts 1–2, 5, 21–24, 37; hideous 5; largest 20; palace 5; Portuguese 15 Foucault, Michel 128 France 60, 65, 67–68, 70–71, 73, 103, 105–106, 111, 122–123; and the colonialists in Viet-nam 105; in Indochina and North Africa 114; and the occupation of Algeria 114–115; and the revolution 105 France, and socialism 106 freedom 53, 64, 87, 90, 96–98, 108, 116, 125; corporal 89; individual 86–88; proclaiming of 86; territorial 87 French Communist Party 63, 105, 107 Freud, Sigmund 3 frugality 87, 101–102, 105–106; Africanderived 107; and colonial urbanites 105; economic 87; state 105 Futurists 55–56, 65 Galle 17, 21, 24, 37 Gandhi, Indira 93, 115–116 Gandhi, Mahatma 115–116 Glissant, Edouard 41, 124 globalization 69, 80, 82 God 92 gods 77, 113 Gomez-Barris, Macarena 129 Goree Island 17 Governors Island 127–130, 132 Gramsci, Antonio 7, 10 Greeks 115, 122–123 Guattari, Felix 135 Gullah Islands 4 guns 64, 77, 97–98 Guys, Constantin 55 Haiti 64–65 Haitian revolutions 105 Hanh, Thich Nhat 116, 122 Hanoi 34, 58, 96, 99–102, 104–105, 109; city of 99, 101, 108; and the French torture chambers 58; modern 100 Harbor Islands 78 Hart Island 129–132 Herodotus 112–113

Index   143 Hindus 2–4, 7, 18, 20, 34, 47, 77, 93, 95, 121 history 5–7, 15–18, 35–37, 41, 43, 46–47, 59–61, 64–65, 68, 77–78, 104–105, 111–112, 124–125, 130–132, 134–135; administrative 16; coastal 8; colonial 95, 115; eighteenth-century 130; forgotten 5, 25; fraught 90; global 48, 64, 126; mapping 31; maritime 8, 10, 85; medieval 35; migrant 89; post-national 16; postcolonial migratory 96; social 8, 10; violent 33, 85, 129 Ho Chi Minh 64–65, 102, 105–109 Ho Chi Minh City 101 Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum 100–101, 108 Hoan Kiem Lake 104–105 Hobsbawm, Eric 53–54 Husserl, Edmund 4–6 independence 2, 7, 87, 105–106, 116, 130 India 2–3, 5, 7, 9, 18–19, 25, 31–35, 37, 50–51, 90–91, 93–96, 114–116, 119, 121, 136–138; coastal 138; immigrants 91, 96; and the Maoists 97; modern 7; nationalism 3–4, 7, 18; postindependence 80; Southern 81, 96, 138 India, communist politics in 96 Indian Ocean 1–2, 4–9, 11–12, 15–19, 21–29, 31, 34–35, 37, 41–44, 46–48, 78–86, 89, 94–95, 97–98, 134–139; and the Arabian Sea 138; and the Caribbean 25; cultures 93, 115; forces 19; habitations 19; influences 7; regions 8 Indo-Chinese intellectuals 107 Indo-Chinese routes 115 Indonesia 20, 109 Islam 26, 29, 31–33, 36, 82–83, 92, 97–98, 119–122, 124, 139; diasporic 121; peoples 91; radical contemporary 121; reformist 121 Islamic Law 92, 122; see also Sharia Law islands 7, 23, 30–31, 44–45, 78–79, 125, 127–132, 139; Andaman Islands 30–31; Bolghatty Island 78–79; Cape Verde Islands 23, 114; Eastern Islands 78; Far Rockaways 129, 131, 133; Goree Island 17; Governors Island 127–130, 132; Gullah Islands 4; Harbor Islands 78; Hart Island 129–132; low-lying 137; Maldive Islands 18, 24, 30–31, 34, 36, 138; Mattanchery Island 37; military 130; Randall’s Island 129; Randolph’s Island 131; Rikers Island 128–132; Robben Island 17, 36; Rockaway

Islands 130–132; Spice Islands 22; Staten Island 129; Vypin Island 26, 78; Ward Island 128–129, 131–132; Welfare Island 130; Willingdon Island 79 Istanbul 31–32 James of Vitry 111–112, 122–123 Jay, Martin 52 Kabul 113, 121 Kakar, Sudhir 3, 23 Karumadikuttan 18–19 Karumadikuttan (Black granite Buddha of Ambalapuzha, Alleppey) 18–19 Kerala 4, 9–12, 18, 25, 27–28, 38, 50, 80, 82, 89–90, 96–97, 109, 115, 118, 135; coast 4, 7, 18–19, 30, 32, 34, 77, 96, 138; Communist Party 90, 96–97; cultures 82, 89; language 89; provinces 91; urban 80 Kerala Kalamandalam of Dar es Salaam 89 knowledge 31, 40–43, 58, 62, 111, 114, 137; comparative 136; cultural 89, 96; limited 134; peripatetic 129; precolonial 42; production 40, 45; sensory 95; shared 41; social 95; transmitted 91; urban 26 Kodungallur (formally Cranganore) 18, 32–33, 37–39 Kostelanetz, Richard 65 Kottarpuram Waterway 19 landscape 8, 17, 19–20, 23–24, 26, 33, 40, 52, 78, 85, 117, 124, 131; brutal 112; coastal 2, 41, 85; geopolitical 67; marine 134; visual 26; windswept 130 Latour, Bruno 134–135 Lefebvre, Henri 3–4 Leiris, Michel 57 Lenin 77, 82, 102, 106 Leninism 109 Leon, Rodney 126–127 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van 19 Lisbon 22, 26, 36–37, 84 Luxemburg, Rosa 106 Lyotard, Francois 63, 65 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 58, 62 Macao 18, 24, 37, 77–78 Magellan, Ferdinand 19, 36 Magloire-Saint-Aude, Clément 65 Makeba, Miriam 93

144   Index Malabar 4–10, 16–22, 28, 30–32, 34–35, 43, 46–47, 77–78, 80, 82, 95–96, 138; coast of 8, 18, 22, 34, 46, 79, 137; and New York 128; region 16, 30–31, 33–34, 138 Malacca 21, 27–28, 78, 96, 98 Maldive Islands 18, 24, 30–31, 34, 36, 138 Manhattan 24–25, 77–79, 94, 121, 124–126, 130–131, 134; burial sites 132; and Chinatown 129; island of 30, 129–130; modern 126 manifestos 56–57, 86 maps 23–25, 30, 36, 40–41, 95, 137; detailed 23; embossed 126; sixteenthcentury 95; Vinckboons’ 24 “Mar Portuguese” 36, 38 Marco Polo 19, 77 Marinetti, F.T. 56 Marseille 61, 64, 69, 105, 107 Martinique 65 Marxists 7, 18, 78, 91, 96–97, 102 Mattanchery Island 37 Mauss, Marcel 54–55, 66, 113–114 Mbembe, Achille 43, 57 McKay, Claude 64, 69, 106–107 Mediterranean 16, 40, 42, 80 memory 5–6, 10, 12, 17, 31, 35–36, 41, 44, 47, 49, 78, 81, 104, 121, 129; ceremonial 104; indelible 86; physiognomic 126; repressed 20, 41, 85 mentalities 11, 13, 76, 126, 138 Mignolo, Walter xii migrants 79, 81, 131 migrations 1, 36, 85, 93, 95 Minh, Ho Chi 64–65, 102, 105–109 Mombasa 15, 17, 36–37, 42, 47, 77, 95, 100 monuments 85, 101, 104, 125, 127 Morocco 52–53, 63, 112 Morton, Timothy 18, 25, 135–137 Moscow 53, 67, 78, 97, 106 mosques 33 Moten, Fred 4, 18, 57 Mukherjee, Rila 42, 48 multidirectional xi, 8 Mumbai 27–28 Muscat 20, 77, 79–80 Muslims 21, 33–35, 47, 77, 91–93, 95, 119–121, 138 Muziris 8, 17, 31–32, 138 Nairobi 94, 121 nationalism 3, 9, 12, 27–28, 87; cultural 87; in India 3–4, 7, 18

navigational fabulations 2 navigators 36–37 Negro Burial Ground (New York) 125, 127 Negros 61, 107 New Amsterdam 18, 124–125 New Delhi 9–12, 26–29, 38–39, 96, 98, 122–123, 139 New York 50, 78, 86, 94, 120–121, 123–124, 126–127, 129, 132–134; agglomeration of wetlands, sandbars, barrier islands and mudflats 128; and Amsterdam 61; archipelago 129, 132, 134; Chinatown 125; colonial 25; estuary 129; harbor 127, 131; and Islamic connections to 95; and London 105; and the streets and waterfront of New Amsterdam 125; and Wall Street 25, 101, 124–125 Niehaus, Jan 19 Nieuhoff, John 21 non-human 6, 19, 40, 42 Nyerere, Julius K. 69, 86, 90, 95, 96n6 ocean currents 22, 34, 138 oceanic 15–16, 42–43, 45–46; ecology 138; epistemologies 18, 43; historicity 127; imaginaries 15, 25, 37; ontologies 25, 42–44, 47; routes 16, 18; spaces 15–16, 42; thinking 16–17 oceans 2, 6, 10, 12, 15–16, 23, 31–32, 35–43, 46–47, 79, 85, 96, 134, 136; acidity of 136; borderless 134; colliding 35; curving 51; violent 35 old wealth 24 ontological xiii, xiv, 4, 9, 16, 19, 41–42, 44, 45, 46, 66, 129, 135 ontology 2, 6, 19, 25, 41, 43, 44–47, 137 oubliette 15 paintings 25, 53–54 Palace Fort of Sans Souci 5 Palmer, John 131 Pandey, Gyan 7 Paris 50, 53, 57, 61, 63–64, 66–68, 105–107 paupers 111–112 peasant revolutions 105 peasants 90, 99, 108, 111 pepper 21, 27, 30, 115 Periplus (manuscript document) 78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108 Periyar River 31, 32, 37 Pessoa, Fernando 36–37

Index   145 Phoenicians 31–32 Picasso, Pablo 58, 68 pillage 6, 16–17, 26, 31, 35, 45, 60, 110–117, 119, 121, 123; Bamiyan 110–111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123; food 110, 114–115; and plunder 17, 26, 60, 110, 112–116; Renaissance world of colonial expansionism and 26 pirates 25, 48, 51, 77 poems 36, 67–68 politics 5, 7, 65, 94, 115 Polo, Marco 19, 77 populations 21, 114, 128, 136; buried African 127; enslaving 34; flexible migrant 80; Muslim 7, 21; nomadic 80 Portuguese 1–2, 5–6, 8, 17, 20, 22, 26, 35, 37–39, 47, 51, 53, 77–79, 81, 114–115; coastal littorals of the South Asian region 16; colonial architecture 32, 78, 85; colonial past 16, 37, 136; and Dutch cargoes collecting pepper and spices 21; occupation 115; slavery 84 Portuguese Sea 36–38 post-independence 3, 7, 16, 18, 34, 43, 57, 80, 89, 102, 137; era 7, 57, 137; India 80; phases 3, 89; transition 102 postcolonial state 85–86, 89 potable water 136 potentialities xii–xiv, 41, 43–44, 47, 136 potentiality xi, xii, 1, 4, 6, 43–47, 62 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 43–44 power 9, 11–12, 31, 53, 68, 72, 91, 102, 108, 113, 115–116, 121, 137; colonizing 22; communist 97–98; differentials 60; imperial 115; political 97–98, 116; reclaiming 120; seafaring military 22 practices 1, 3, 22, 31, 35, 42, 54, 61, 81, 91, 93–97, 102, 115–116, 119–121, 138; contemporary 42, 95; cultural 1, 3, 47; indigenous 93; social 34, 54, 61, 64, 66, 93, 97, 119–120; transport-networked 81 praxis 17, 41, 135–136 prayers 86, 92–93 Prebisch, Charles S. 121n1 Prestholdt, Jeremy 41–42 prisons 1, 8, 60, 68, 128–130 public discourse 8, 120 Quilon (port) 11, 18, 20–24, 30–31, 34, 37, 40, 47, 79–80, 86 Qur’an 36, 92 Randall’s Island 129

Randolph’s Island 131 revolutions 56, 61, 86, 88, 102, 105, 108–109; French 105; Haitian 105; peasant 105; social 86, 88, 106 Rikers Island 128–132 Robben Island 17, 36 Robeson, Paul 68 Rockaways Islands 130–132 Roosevelt Island 128–132 ruins 8–9, 15, 17, 19, 31, 46, 61–63, 67, 77, 113; historical 31; of Portuguese slave forts 84 Said, Edward 3, 51 Salaam 1, 15, 86; and Abu Dhabi 96; and Dakar 102; harbor 2; to Zanzibar 36 Sankofa 2, 126 Sarajevo 101–102 Sartre, Jean-Paul 60, 67, 114 schools 1, 84–85, 100, 121 scooters 99–100 sculptures 53–54, 122n23 Sea Log 1–2, 6–8 sea logs 4–5, 19, 23 Sea of India 31 Sea of Marmara 32, 37–38, 136 seafarers 33–34 seafaring history 19, 33 Second Temple 31, 33 “Second World” 101–102, 109 secular modernism 18, 93 self 3, 53, 55, 57, 70, 73, 89, 92, 107, 112, 117, 127, 136; bodily 115; technologized 56; unified nationalist 93 self-inventions 63, 127; corporeal 89; modern 102; vigilant protean 108 self-reliance 87, 90, 96 Senghor, Leopold 59, 65–67, 71, 105–107 Sharia Law 92 Sharpe, Christina 8 Shiva, Vandana 137 shock 2, 21, 26, 30–35, 37–39, 50–52, 54–63, 65, 94–95, 99, 110, 135, 138; of arrival 2, 9, 11; of arrival at an entirely new continent across the sea 2; cognitive 54; colonial 58; cultural 37; ecological 136; epistemological 23, 33; ethnographic 62; feminist perspective 17; historic 31; history of 37, 51; impact of 33–34; of modernity 32, 50–51; perceptual 54–55, 66; reverse 60; tactile 85 slavery and the slave trade 54, 64, 84–85, 95, 126–127

146   Index slaves 21, 23, 53, 84, 110, 124 social change 3, 86, 90–91, 99, 106 social revolutions 86, 88, 106 socialism 62, 70, 72, 86, 93, 96, 98, 102, 105–106 socialist 84–85, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 102, 106, 121; anthem (Muslim) 93; citizenship 87–88; cultures 101; housing 102; modernity 99, 107; philosophy 91; policies 87, 89, 102; policy initiatives 86; revolution 91; transformation 90 South Africa 21, 34, 67, 115–116 South Asia 9, 11, 16, 31, 34, 38–39, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 137–138; and Indochina 68; migrations 95; and Southeast Asia 53 South China Seas 16, 32, 34, 78, 80–81, 136 South India 7, 9, 18, 34, 50, 77, 81, 89, 97, 109, 115 Soviets 43, 88, 94, 96–97, 102, 108 Speke, John 84 Spice Islands 22 Spinoza, Benedict 42 Sri Lanka (called Ceylon before 1972) 17, 30, 34 Stalin, Joseph 77, 82, 106 Stanley, Henry 84 state ideologies 88, 102 Staten Island 129 streets 4, 23–24, 33, 37, 54–55, 61, 63–64, 68, 85, 99–100, 103–104, 109, 125, 131; cobblestoned 128; transient 127 suburban sprawl 101–102 Sukarno 109 Swahili 1, 43, 47, 81, 90, 93–94, 96; communities 93; culture of Tanzania 91; memories 95 Syrians 8, 32, 78–79 tactile 54–55, 61, 67, 85, 127; knowledge 95; practices 95; spheres 46–47 Tagus River 36–37 Tana Baru 35–36 Tanzania 1–2, 15, 17, 21, 43, 81, 85–86, 88–91, 95–98, 102, 109; and Asians 43, 90, 95; experiments to regiment human social actions 88; and Indian transformations toward agrarian modernization 101; and Kerala forms of social change 90; socialism 89–90, 96 Tarahumara 62, 69 Taussig, Michael 51 tea 53, 95–96, 114, 116

technologies 45, 54–55, 62, 65, 70, 73, 78, 108, 120; Chinese 8; emerging 57; new 53–54; pioneering 54 Texel 24–25 Thailand 19, 81 Thangassery 20–22 torture 57, 64 traditions 47, 89, 91–92, 96, 98, 106, 121; Bahai 95; cultural 78; fishing 46; folk theater 50; indigenous 90; informal 96; intellectual 67; sacred 36 trans-oceanic 15–17, 25, 34, 43, 45, 57–58, 80–81; influences 18; interchanges 58; tides 45; trade 43, 80 transformations 34, 43, 67; cultural 7; historical 91; social 3, 64, 86; volatile 34 transnational consciousness percolates 62 transnational terrorist organizations 119–120 travelers 68, 78, 100–101, 108 Trouillot, Michel 2, 5, 41 Tsiang, Huen 19 United States see US US 4, 51, 88, 95, 116, 119–120, 124, 134; and China interests 138; geo-politics 94; military interests 137; Pacific Command 137; power relations 137; security interests 137 US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam 94 Vasco da Gama 19, 35–36, 77 Victoria Layout 93 Vientiane 101–102 Vietnam 60, 65, 68, 81, 101, 104–106, 109 Vietnamese Declaration of Independence 105 Vinckboons, Johannes (also known as Joao Vingboons) 22–24 Vingboons, Joao 23 Vink, Markus 42 violence 6, 9, 19, 21, 47, 57–58, 66, 85, 116, 120–121, 126; anti-Asian 119; epistemic 61; epistemological 86 Vitry, James of 111–112, 122–123 Vypin Island 26, 78 Wall, Diana diZerega 129 Wall Street (New York City) 25, 101, 124–125 Ward Island 128–129, 131–132 wars 52, 69, 93, 113, 117, 119

Index   147 water 16–17, 22, 25, 30, 40, 44–45, 51, 104–105, 118, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136–137, 139; bodies of 16, 40–42, 104; drinking 136; fresh 130; management 25; oceanic 127; politics 82; potable 136 waterways 78, 128, 134 wealth 17, 22, 24, 57, 89, 91, 103; of Dutch families 24; old 24 weapons 105, 115–116 Welfare Island 130 Western Indian Ocean 19, 25, 42 Willingdon Island 79 women 3, 21, 23, 43, 99–100, 103–105,

124–125, 130; cadres 99; and children 43, 124; commuters 99; domestics 80; immigrants 43; massacre of 114; middle-class 99 workers 30, 90, 99, 124; domestic 81; white 69 working-class peoples 97–98, 106 World War II 62, 67 Wynter, Sylvia 41, 46, 52, 124 Yenan (province of China) 89–90, 97–98 Yenan-style experiments 90 Zuider Zee 22, 24–25