Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World

Abstract

This special issue, “Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World,” seeks to dismantle the myth of belonging which intrudes in identity constructions and, simultaneously, enhances the in-betweenness that defines a rhizomatic understanding of historical, socio-cultural and national affiliations in the Indian Ocean. The texts we explore here express the need to belong but they also highlight the fact that there is no unilateral sense of belonging. This special issue is formulated upon the theoretical paradigm of the aesthetics of remembering, a theoretical tool that studies postcolonial expressions of selfhood through three axes: empathy, identification and mourning. The recognition of a deep-seated communal self is a key factor in the functionality of our aesthetics of remembering which brings to the fore the rhizomatic nature of Indian Ocean culture. As an alternative to the tree-like construction of knowledge that has defined Western philosophy, the rhizome, as presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, advocates for a planar, horizontal, non-hierarchical model of thinking in continuous expansion. We have proposed an innovative study of contemporary Indian Ocean literature in English that combines former critical appreciations of the area as a porous, flexible and permeable space with our more recent aesthetics of remembering which envisions the space as a rhizomatic community expanding its roots in a trans-oceanic manner. Therefore, we claim that the authors discussed in this volume —2021 Nobel prize winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, M. G. Vassanji, Nayomi Munaweera, Ronnie Govender, Imraan Coovadia, Lindsey Collen, Amitav Ghosh and Tishani Doshi construct rhizomatic narrations that connect worlds spatially and temporally through acts of empathy and mourning performances.

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Keywords

aesthetics of remembering, belonging, community, Indian Ocean, rhizome, roots