Performing Memories and Weaving Archives:

Performing Memories and Weaving Archives:

Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean

By Sayan Dey

This book engages with how the South African Indians in South Africa and Siddis in Gujarat perform creolized musical, spiritual, and culinary practices in their respective geopolitical spaces in the contemporary era.

Paperback, 114 Pages

ISBN:9781839986901

December 2023

£20.99, $24.95

  • About This Book
  • Reviews
  • Author Information
  • Series
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
  • Podcasts

About This Book

Usually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and hardly engage with the evolution, movements, and shifts about the Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. But multiple published, unpublished, authored, and non-authored historical documents like the historical records of Greco-Egyptian monk Cosmos Indicopleustes (sixthcentury BC), the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (firstcentury CE), the travelogues of Ibn Battuta (fourteenthcentury), historical records of Tome Pires (sixteenthcentury), accounts of British historians William Hawkins and Sir Thomas Roe (seventeenthcentury), accounts of French historian Abbe Carre (seventeenthcentury), accounts of French Lieutenant de Grandpre (nineteenthcentury), and many more mention about the trade relations between India and different parts for Africa. The items of trade involved exotic stones, exotic spices, domestic objects, and local people.

Despite the existence of these diverse archival documents on the IOW trade activities, any discourses on the IOW continue to remain an understatement. The narratives on the IOW, to a vast extent, have been shaped by Western/colonial historians, who have imaginatively constructed the IOW within separate geographical, cultural, epistemological, and ontological enclaves. Based on these socio-historical arguments, this book unearths how Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa preserve their ancestral memories through spiritual, culinary, and musical practices on the one side, and generate creolized socio-cultural spaces of collective decolonial resistance and well-being on the other.

Reviews

Author Information

Sayan Dey is from Kolkata, India, and is currently working as as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language and Literature, School of Liberal Arts, Alliance University, Bangalore. His areas of research interests are postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, critical race studies, food humanities, and critical diversity literacy.

Series

No series for this title.

Table of Contents

Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1.Introduction: Nomoshkar- Sanibona- Vanakkam- Molweni- Hujambo; 2.Porosity: Reservations and Fluidities; 3.Spiritual Memories; 4.Musical and Dance Memories; 5.Culinary Memories; 6.Continuity: Weaving Archipelagoes of Resistance; Afterword; Index       

Links

Comodo SSL