Vertical Indian Ocean: A Cultural History of the Southern Submarine

The Indian Ocean has been called the “ocean of the South”, as well as the “ocean of the future”. It is largely conceived as a sociopolitical space, with its long history of monsoon-enabled South-South connections, between Africa, South Asia and the Arab world. Ships traverse its surfaces, carrying the people and goods whose journeys mark a particular supra-national and sub-global political arena, constituting a distinctive oceanic world that—in its literary and cultural representation—gives shape and content to the formation of the global south. However, particularly in a time of warming seas and a changing monsoon system, what also needs attention is the ways in which the ocean itself is represented, as an ecological as well as postcolonial space. This project proposes a submersive method of reading, going below the waterline to take account of three-dimensional oceanic space in and from the south. It explores representations of Indian Ocean connection in relation to the undersea, placing stranger-than-fiction events of the deep Indian Ocean in conversation with its myth, art and writing.