Thalassological Worldmaking and Literary Circularities in the Indian Ocean

Abstract Although the study of Indian Ocean literary circularities is a relatively new and dynamic field, it calls for alternative paradigms for global literary history in light of the nascent conversation between comparative world literature and oceanic studies. Following the creative work of prominent writers of the Indian Ocean (including Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), the concept of literary circularities is anchored in the study of multiple intersecting and networked sites of exchange, circulation, migration, and encounter in this vast oceanic space that has mediated a dynamic cross-cultural traffic across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In response to the territorial logic of old and new comparative literature, the polysemic nature of the Indian Ocean invites the following the question: what would world literature look like when terracentric biases of the field are unsettled? In other words, how does the thalassological poetics of the Indian Ocean also remap approaches to literary categories themselves? The Indian Ocean’s literary waves and the generic wateriness they create offer a set of analytical categories as they rescale narrative as a living, moving, recombining, recycling practice of memory, connection, and connectivity.