Clarissa Vierke - Böcker

Transoceanic and Transmedial Imaginaries in the Indian Ocean explores multiple aesthetic relations constantly in flux, which construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the Indian Ocean. It addresses the questions of how the arts – music, literature, visual art, and performance – relate to and dynamically create imaginaries of the Indian Ocean as a transcontinental space.Contributors focus on the relations and interference of various art forms, including literature, music, visual arts, installations, and performance as well as local crafts, and cross the boundaries of language(s), which have often separated views of the Indian Ocean along the monolingual logic of disciplines. This book takes a transmedial perspective and studies the Indian Ocean as a fluid space, in which languages, images, music, and dance movements have been traveling and influencing each other for centuries. It analyzes how music, verbal, audiovisual, or performative arts use imagery, sound, narrative, and performances to make alternative relations across space and time and to make transoceanic visions and histories perceptible. Focusing on the aesthetic approach, this book combines various formats to capture the complex and often complementary interconnectedness of different stories told using various media, creating different atmospheres and touching other senses.This book is a novel contribution to the study of the Indian Ocean and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership, including literature, cultural studies, visual arts, performance, anthropology, and history, but also social geography, linguistics, and music studies.

This book features writing by 17 authors from Germany and from African and Latin American countries on highly diverse aesthetic phenomena as seen from their own different points of view. The texts in this volume all deal with the imperative of ‘decolonization’: they try to highlight aesthetic strategies for the (re)discovery of unthematized, misappropriated, transcultural and even transcontinental histories and memories and aesthetic practices that are absent from or too little perceived within national consciousnesses. Novels, poems and musical performances from the East African region are analysed as intertwined histories of the Indian Ocean and its different languages. Artworks of the Black Atlantic and perceptions of Africa are discussed from, for example, Brazilian perspectives. Within the German context, decolonisation strategies in exhibition practices in ethnological or art museums developed by Nigerian artists are evaluated; new terms such as ‘dividuation’ are proposed to describe these contemporary composite-cultural entanglements, and so on. A stimulating, wide-ranging and heterogeneous portrait of contemporary interwoven world cultures!