Reading the Indian Ocean (Mustafa): Literature, Film, Music, & Poetry

"As is well known to a restricted company of specialists in the English-speaking world, there are and have been for centuries, writers from the Indian Ocean world. There exist and have existed in the past significant literary movements and major authors. Nonethe less, I remain intrigued by the fact that the category of Indian Ocean literature has never quite achieved the kind of prominence enjoyed by say, Caribbean literature, to consider just one other example of a corpus of texts associated with mainly coastal and island based communities, sharing in common similar experiences of slavery, indentured labor, colonialism, and other deprivations of political and economic rights. Efforts to project the Indian Ocean world as a zone of distinctiveness and coherence have not yet borne much fruit in the literary field. In universities in the English-speaking world, there are courses on African literature, on Caribbean literature, on Black literature, on Asian literature, but few courses I would suggest on Indian Ocean literature. The fault is of course partially ours as scholars, but it may also reflect a deeper malaise on the part of the communities whose texts we are seeking to systematize. (From: Adejunmobi, M. (2009). Claiming the Field: Africa and the space of Indian Ocean literature." Callaloo 32(4), pp.1247-1261.)