Indian Ocean Corc. Sovereign

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar aims to introduce students to the sociocultural worlds of the Indian Ocean rim from the eastern coast of Africa through the Persian Gulf to the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China. Although the Indian Ocean rim has a history of interconnectivity and exchange spanning millennia, it has only recently started to attract scholarly attention. As a consequence, studies on this world lag behind those of movement and connectivity in the relatively more recent Atlantic World. Over millennia, plants, animals, people, languages, ideas, religions, precious stones, metals, technologies and a vast array of raw and manufactured commodities crisscrossed the vibrant corridors of the Indian Ocean to lands bordering it and beyond. Over fourteen weeks, we shall trace old and new connections between disparate peoples and places across this shared geographical space: merchant and slave networks, diasporic circularities generated by commercial and imperial expansion, and transnational religious communities. We shall pay particular attention to the textures of cultural encounters in this region, emphasizing similarities and divergences as well as continuities and changes in the everyday lives of people belonging to littoral societies. We shall also pay attention to the shifting, variegated nature of sovereignty across the Indian Ocean rim, focusing not only who wields power but also the idioms of legitimate authority spanning long distances.