This special section grows out of the symposium Colorful Threads: The Interwoven Worlds of Art and Culture in the Western Indian Ocean, which we organized at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, in December 2023. The symposium formed part of the institute's 2022 – 2024 season, Thinking the Archipelago: Africa's Indian Ocean Islands, developed by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Uday Chandra, and Jeremy Prestholdt. Their framing of the season invited us to reconsider the Indian Ocean not as peripheral to African and Asian histories but as a region that unsettles the conceptual categories through which those histories have been organized. In our introductory remarks, we observed that even as humanities scholarship habitually invokes transculturation and entanglement, the study of art and expressive forms continues to depend on territorial and ethnicized classifications. Artistic forms and practices are still labeled “African,” “Asian,” or “Arab,” or are gathered under more capacious rubrics such as “Afro-Asia.” Even this term, which suggests that boundaries or identities have somehow been crossed or merged, conceals the unequal labor and social hierarchies that structure relations in the Western Indian Ocean. To analyze the arts of this region without acknowledging these conditions risks turning histories of domination into obfuscating narratives of “cultural mixing.”The Western Indian Ocean was shaped by slave plantation economies, indenture regimes, mercantile hierarchies, and the ongoing struggles of communities for whom belonging was never guaranteed. On islands especially, where histories of slavery, forced movement, and settlement are layered, claims to Indigeneity and cultural rootedness become highly charged terrain. In such contexts, art and cultural expression do not simply reflect or enact mixture or contact; they bear the imprint of coercion, negotiation, attachment, concealment, refusal, and survival. It is these histories and their ongoing afterlives that we sought to foreground in the symposium.The articles in this special section examine cultural production in the Western Indian Ocean as shaped by slavery, indenture, empire, and displacement. Rather than treating the region as a harmonious crossroads of Africa and Asia, they attend to the uneven conditions under which expressive forms are created. In different ways, each contribution shows how art, performance, and media register historical pressures—whether through gendered self-fashioning, the work of exile, or the social life of cinema. What links these articles is not only a shared geography but also an analytic attention to how cultural forms emerge from histories marked by coercion, caste and racial hierarchy, and contested belonging.Natasha Bissounath's article on Kama La Mackerel's ZOM-FAM places queer and transfemme self-making at the center of Mauritian indenture history. Rather than searching for evidence of queer ancestors in the colonial archive, La Mackerel creates an ancestor named Kumkum as a critique of the archive's refusal to acknowledge queer and transfemme presence in the first place. The kala pani crossing is not figured solely as rupture; it becomes a site of imaginative reconstruction, where Mauritian Creole (Kreol) carries gendered memory, embodiment, and survivance. The poem shows that queerness does not arrive belatedly to indenture but is one of its enduring forms of life.R. Benedito Ferrão's article on Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar turns to another trajectory: movement across Goa, Portugal, and Mozambique during and after the end of empire. Here the ocean is not a metaphor of fluidity but a medium of displacement and longing. Navelcar's drawings and paintings record attachments that cannot be reconciled into a single national or cultural identity, revealing art as a means of inhabiting histories that refuse resolution.James Burns's study of cinema in Mauritius examines how film exhibition and spectatorship became central to public life in the mid-twentieth century. Rather than treating Mauritius as a passive receiver of metropolitan cultural forms, Burns shows how cinema owners and audiences shaped film circulation and meaning across the Indian Ocean. The cinema functioned as a social institution in which racial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries were negotiated, contested, and sometimes provisionally suspended.Taken together, these articles resist framing the Western Indian Ocean as either a zone of seamless cultural encounter or a geography defined only by extraction and harm. They hold open the complexity of relation formed under conditions that were never equal. Cultural expression here is not a celebration of syncretism nor a denial of violence, but a mode of living with difficult histories.
Fair et al. (Fri,) studied this question.