1 - The Place Beyond a Place: Materialities, Mobilities, and Trans-Indian Oceanic Exchanges

This paper aims to map different trajectories of exchanges that link West African, Sahelian, and Indian Ocean worlds from pre-modern times to the present to examine how multiple spatial imaginaries of Africa get constructed by Afro-Indian and Afro-Arab communities in the western Indian Ocean. Looking at different examples from western India, the Arabian Gulf, and West Africa, I discuss how imagined worlds of Africa and the Indian Ocean are dislocated, misplaced, or generalized, yet are interestingly mapped onto particular objects, thus producing connections through material religions, memories, texts, and with the power of humans and non-human agencies. Building on the poetics of a place beyond place (Doreen Massey 2009), where a place indexes another place, I reflect upon entangled histories of Black Indian Ocean worlds that present the non-conventional cartographies and trajectories of exchanges between Africa, Arabia, and Asia. In particular, I discuss how the sensemaking of African cartographies by the communities of African descent in the Indian Ocean is shaped through affective objects and spirited geographies. In other words, I ask how places, networks, and practices born out of historical connections between Africa and the Indian Ocean get mapped onto affective objects and how they, in turn, disorder and realign spaces to question established notions of what constitutes cartography. How can these Afro-Indian and Afro-Arab materialities and cartographies of identity help us reimagine the Black histories of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean?