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India in Africa, Africa in India traces the longstanding interaction between these two regions, showing that the Indian Ocean world provides many examples of cultural flows that belie our understanding of globalization as a recent phenomenon. This region has had, and continues to have, an internal integrity that touches the lives of its citizens in their commerce, their cultural exchanges, and their concepts of each other and of themselves in the world. These connections have deep historical roots, and their dynamics are not attributable solely to the effects of European colonialism, modernity, or contemporary globalization -- although these forces have left their mark. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume come from the fields of history, literature, dance, sociology, gender studies, and religion, making this collection unique in its recreation of an entire world too seldom considered as such.

India in Africa, Africa in India traces the longstanding interaction between these two regions, showing that the Indian Ocean world provides many examples of cultural flows that belie our understanding of globalization as a recent phenomenon. This region has had, and continues to have, an internal integrity that touches the lives of its citizens in their commerce, their cultural exchanges, and their concepts of each other and of themselves in the world. These connections have deep historical roots, and their dynamics are not attributable solely to the effects of European colonialism, modernity, or contemporary globalization--although these forces have left their mark. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume come from the fields of history, literature, dance, sociology, gender studies, and religion, making this collection unique in its recreation of an entire world too seldom considered as such.

Suitable for the classroom but completely accessible to the general reader, this volume presents many of the most interesting authors writing today from an Islamic background—Kamel Daoud, Yasmine el Rashidi, Hisham Matar, Tahar Djaout, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Edward Said, Driss Chaibi, Kamila Shamsie, Tahar ben Jelloun, Leila Aboulela, Abdellah Taïa, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hisham Matar, Eboo Patel, Reza Aslan, and Tamim Ansary, among others—who embody the various strains of Islamic interpretation and conflict. This study discusses an ongoing Reformation in Islam, focusing on the Arab Spring, the role of women and sexuality, the "clash of civilizations," assimilation and cosmopolitanism, jihad, pluralism across cultures, free speech and apostasy. In an atmosphere of political and religious awakening, these authors search for a voice for individual rights while nations seek to restore a "disrupted destiny." Questions of "de-Arabization" of the religion, ecumenicism, comparative modernities, and the role of literature thread themselves throughout the chapters of the book. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1488/thumbnail.jpg

Suitable for the classroom but completely accessible to the general reader, this volume presents many of the most interesting authors writing today from an Islamic background—Kamel Daoud, Yasmine el Rashidi, Hisham Matar, Tahar Djaout, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Edward Said, Driss Chaibi, Kamila Shamsie, Tahar ben Jelloun, Leila Aboulela, Abdellah Taïa, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hisham Matar, Eboo Patel, Reza Aslan, and Tamim Ansary, among others—who embody the various strains of Islamic interpretation and conflict. This study discusses an ongoing Reformation in Islam, focusing on the Arab Spring, the role of women and sexuality, the "clash of civilizations," assimilation and cosmopolitanism, jihad, pluralism across cultures, free speech and apostasy. In an atmosphere of political and religious awakening, these authors search for a voice for individual rights while nations seek to restore a "disrupted destiny." Questions of "de-Arabization" of the religion, ecumenicism, comparative modernities, and the role of literature thread themselves throughout the chapters of the book. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1533/thumbnail.jpg

Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid, and Arundhati Roy join the ranks of south Asian novelists who also write political essays. They address various factions in society, but share a common disgust with institutional corruption and political maneuvering, and manipulation of the powerless. While attacking defensive posturing and aggressive venality, they argue for a nation that finds its strength in pluralism and that embraces the poor.

In a recent study of masculine identity in the fiction of the Arab East since 1967, Samira Aghacy analyzes those novels that "possess an underlying political awareness revealing the centrality of political life in the fiction of the Arab East and the precedence of collective over private issues" (Aghacy, 7). Hisham Matar, though, has chosen to work against the grain and to shrink the political down to the personal; politics remain almost unseen, ghost-like, something his protagonists cannot comprehend or fully see. 1 Muhammad Siddiq famously notes that "any writer can ill afford to remain uninvolved and merely watch history march by from his aesthetic ivory tower" (Siddiq, xi), but Matar' s decision to employ youthful narrators reflecting back on their younger selves provides more than an aesthetic withdrawal from politics: he has found a method to create an ironic distancing from the larger social upheaval that continues to disrupt the lives of countless Libyan men. He is intent on examining a personal crisis not only in its particular Libyan historical context, but also as exemplary of some common tropes of the psychosexual development of many men across the Arabic world. Aghacy suggests that "patriarchal masculinity" - the sort embodied by Qaddafi, for example - "remains a fundamentally paradoxical and non-uniform phenomenon, both commanding and impotent, heroic and cowardly, central and marginal . [so that] instead of generating autonomy and self-government, patriarchy exposes the male individual to a strong sense of personal inadequacy, ineffectuality, and failure to measure up to phallocentric masculine ideals" (3, 5). This is, indeed, Matar's recurring theme, and he chooses the trope of the missing father to suggest a tenuous hold on masculine agency throughout today's Middle East.

The Democracy Spring, or "the Arab Spring," that stretched roughly from December 2010 to mid-2012 and seemed to cross many borders almost at the same time has unsurprisingly become a persistent focus for Egyptian novelists, and they are offering the most cohesive set of responses to that startling turn in contemporary Arab history. Their creative spectrum of reflections on the initial hopes and ultimate disillusionment range from ongoing defiance and hope, to a resigned acceptance. Formalistically this range of responses has expressed itself in self-deprecating wit, demonstrable in Nael Eltoukhy's Women of Karantina (2014); surrealist abstraction and universalist imagery in Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue (2013 [trans. 2016]); a despairing dystopic vision of a relentlessly brutal future in Mohammed Rabie's Otared (2014 [English translation, 2016); and a personal philosophical reflection on the nature of change and stasis, in Yasmine el Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer (2016). Only when such very different works are read together can one appreciate the complex psychological upheaval that is very much alive in Egyptian—and Arabic—society.

As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, "This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation's culture," –an "invisible people" (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York on June 28, 1969, had taken a long time to reach that night's critical mass of public resistance among gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals against institutional prejudice. The Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 in Chicago, was the first recognized gay rights organization in the United States, and activists went on to form the Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles and the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 in San Francisco. Coinciding with these early stirrings of resistance during the McCarthy era in the early '50s, hundreds of those considered to be homosexual were denied employment from the federal government and discharged from the military services. Many justified this bias by making reference to the American Psychiatric Association's 1952 inclusion of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder. In 1959 gays and transgender people protested in Los Angeles, and in 1966 drag queens, hustlers, and transvestites rioted outside Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco when police began arresting transvestites. Nonetheless, the "riots" that went on for five days at Stonewall received greater attention and are now commemorated throughout the United States in the month of June in a series of Gay Pride parades and other events. In 1973 homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders in the DSM, and the pace of gay, lesbian, transgender, as well as bisexual and queer rights accelerated.

Rather than agreeing to any one meaning or referent, most critics these days speak of 'post-colonialisms' to refer principally to 'historical, social and economic material conditions' and at other times to 'historically-situated imaginative products' and 'aesthetic practices: representations, discourses and values' (McLeod 2000: 254). Arising from subaltern studies, its theorists embrace hybridity, indict alterity, analyze colonial discourse, and employ strategic essentialism to promote identity politics. Under its influence, a strain of self-interrogation has for decades run as an undercurrent through much of anthropology and archaeology. Topics including looting, repatriation, stewardship, and the transformation of disciplinary identity are now persistent tropes in the field. Indigenous archaeology, emergent cosmopolitanisms, building up knowledge from below—these now occupy ongoing archaeological work. Limiting its applicability, though, are charges against its homogenization of colonial experience, its perpetuation of academic imperialism, and its relative neglect, until recently, of regions such as Latin America.

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary study, a critical return to its fundamentals rather than its demise" (Miklitsch et al. 281). If we view postcolonial studies as a subset of cultural studies,1 we should not, though, be surprised by a certain level of discomfort as this and other transformative movements massage the body academic, since they change the way members of the discipline understand their proper function as scholars and teachers. As Barthes writes, "interdisciplinary studies . . . do not merely confront already constituted disciplines . . . [and] it is not enough to take a 'subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it" (72), since, according to Joe Moran, their motivating impulses "are characterized not so much by their longing for the authoritativeness of inclusive knowledge as by their uncertainty about how knowledge is formulated and how disciplines fit together" (81). This discomfort, advocates of disciplinary interconnectedness would assert, is a very good thing, since "it is better to be self-questioning than to carry on doing what we have always done for reasons of institutional practicality or intellectual inertia" (113). In any event, let us posit that literary studies in general, and English language literary studies in particular, has never been completely comfortable with itself, and that onslaughts from continental theory, talk of interdisciplinarity, and probings from cultural studies and postcolonial studies (along with identity politics and other social movements) have made English departments look with some trepidation at Classics departments and worry that, like them, they may be teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and lesbian women were suddenly a force to be reckoned with. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians were popping up all over the place: the love that dared not speak its name was shouting from the rooftops. Bisexuals gained a voice; transgendered individuals began the long struggle that is still in its infancy. "Queer" began to blur the distinctions that had defined the identity politics of these early decades. In short, "non-heterosexual" America during these decades was as much a part of the civil rights movement as was any ethnicity. Back in 1956, set to Leonard Bernstein's haunting tunes, Stephen Sondheim could write soulful, yearning lyrics that West Side Story put in the mouths of a heterosexual couple ("There's a place for us,/ Somewhere a place for us . We'll find a new way of living, / We'll find a way of forgiving/ Somewhere . . "), but by 1990 Queer Nation was stripping away all pretence of quiet compliance, shouting "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!"

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call "subaltern cosmopolitanism." Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as one we have all tried our hand at, in one form or another: a record of discomfort in confronting the inconsistencies of another person's-the "other" person's-reality. The book is hardly recognizable as a novel; nor is it simply a historical investigation, since it blends an anthropological record with a travelogue, a diary, and speculations. "Within the parameters of history," Ghosh told one interviewer, "I have tried to capture a story, a narrative, without attempting to write a historical novel. You may say, as a writer, I have ventured on a technical innovation" (Dhawan 1999: 24). In India in Africa, Africa in India we are attempting a parallel "innovation": using what we know of the past to inform our understanding of the present Indian Ocean world; examining today's imaginative interpretations of India by Africans and Africa by Indians to speculate on how, historically, these regions understood each other. Ghosh gathered evidence relating to a Jewish merchant operating in the twelfth century in Aden, and he was seeking to document, more remarkably, the merchant's barely recoverable Indian slave. In the process, Ghosh learns as much about the interpretation his visit gets from the Africans he meets as he does about the merchant Ben Yiju's reception in India and the role of the slave "Bomma" in the world of Indian Ocean commerce seven hundred or so years ago-for Ghosh was as much an object of fascination to the Egyptians as they were to him. There has been a coming and going for centuries, sometimes enforced, sometimes enthusiastically entered into, and one might have thought that this would have made for greater understanding among the various parties. But exactly the opposite was the case when the young doctoral student sat across from the aged imam in the Egyptian village and was told by him to stop doing the strange things that the villagers had heard were done by Hindus. Did his people bury their dead, or cremate them, he was asked. Was he circumcised? Did they worship cows? Is there military service for all in India, as there is in Egypt? Why did they not "purify" (i .e., infibulate or circumcise) their women? In fact, the imam and his villagers seemed to encourage him to remain apart from them, making sure that the young interloper did not enjoy the sense of community that they created during Ramadan. As Ghosh puts it, "to belong to that immense community was a privilege they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries" (A. Ghosh 1992: 76).

Terminology is always a site of politics, and "global South" is no exception. Many of the places proposed as likely areas for discussion in the pages of this new journal are not, in fact, south of the equator. Nor are other areas that are, in fact, south of the border necessarily as appropriate for discussion in this journal. Yet it is appropriate to reach for another terminological alleyway like this one to help us reimagine, yet again, the peoples and topics in question. "Postcolonial," either with or without a hyphen, is contentious; "commonwealth," of course, has been long abandoned (and for starters, is totally Anglocentric). "Non-aligned" is, perhaps, somewhat closer, but a good number of the "southern" peoples are, in fact, aligned. But the spirit of Bandung suggests that there is a general sense among the peoples in question that they recognize each other, and that they share a common destiny of being the industrialized world's underdogs. Can this sixth sense also give hope for a broader and non-eurocentric cosmopolitanism, even a "subaltern" cosmospolitanism. Can a recuperation of the histories of such "other" mercantile and cultural interchanges, such as that of the Indian Ocean world, enliven and empower these groups to render a "flat" world something that is not inevitably one in which they are, once again, those who are pressed beneath the iron?