2023 – 20…: Despite the pioneering efforts of postcolonialism to dismantle Eurocentrism, the truth is that its land and human-centred perspective often re-invigorates the colonial framework that it seeks to overcome. Our previous research on Indian Ocean literatures and cultures has directed us towards an acknowledgement of the centrality of the ocean itself in contraposition to the land mass. To put it otherwise, our subject of study, namely the Indian Ocean, has rendered a terracentric reading inadequate since the ocean, in Isabel Hofmeyr’s words, complicates a land-based version of history (Hofmeyr 2012). The Indian Ocean, in its exhibition of “wider worlds” (Steiner 2010) wherein “coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities” (Lavery, 2021: 4) are intimately connected creates and demands a new aesthetics, which we have named “thalassentric aesthetics”, to reflect the endemic transnationalism that transpires in Indoceanic configurations. Thalassentric Aesthetics emerges out of the need to situate the ocean/sea at the core of literary analysis. In other words, and as we have demonstrated in preceding research projects, the Indoceanic experience cannot be fully apprehended without taking into account the maritime exchanges between Africa and India.

The term “Thalassentric Aesthetics” that defines the methodological approach of our project places aquatic imaginaries at the core of the transoceanic experience. A thalassentric aesthetics works in contraposition to terracentric configurations of power which clearly favour a border-philosophy grounded in the modern concept of the “nation-state” and, in this respect, our proposed thalassentric aesthetics must be inscribed in the relatively recent trend in postcolonial theory known as “the Oceanic Turn”, which positions the ocean as the primordial site of connections among diverse ethno-cultures (Geyer and Bright 1995, Cohen 2010, Chambers 2010, DeLoughrey 2010, Mack 2011, Thomas 2014). A focus on aquatic configurations undermines the “nation” as a satisfactory term to claim belonging and fosters instead a natural transnationalism whereby identities, mirroring the movement of water, are perpetually in flux. Therefore, an aesthetics rooted in the ocean/sea/river dissolves artificial constructions formulated upon land ─read nations─ and accentuates the interactions among and across aquatic bodies. Ironically, British imperialism, itself an outcome of the nation-centered discourse of modernity, connected, albeit in a terracentric colonialist manner, the Indian Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean in ways that only a thalassentric approach can unveil. To set up a dialogue between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic demands foregrounding the categories “Indian Ocean” and “Atlantic Ocean” in detriment of the traditional national and regional distinctions that geared the colonial mapping of the world. In short, what we suggest is an understanding of cultural and literary creations as products of the Indian Ocean and/or the Atlantic Ocean and thus liberate them from the tyranny of national affiliations.