A World(-System) of Debris: Ruins, Remains, and Self-Writing in Narratives across The Indian Ocean

Abstract

Addressing critical debates within the scholarship on Indian Ocean studies, African literary studies, and world literature, this article offers a reflection on the idea of ruins, remains (Stoler, 2013, 2016), and self-writing (Mbembe, 2002) as critical and aesthetic concepts through which visual and literary narratives register the past and problematize the future, suggesting new critical possibilities to address and analyze contemporary African literary writing. Addressing the photography project Mosquito Coast: Travels from Maputo to Mogadishu (Guillaume Bonn, 2015) and the literary works of contemporary authors such as Nuruddin Farah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and João Paulo Borges Coelho, the article aims to problematize Indian Ocean literatures as a field of study and, therefore, to propose a redefinition of literary and visual narratives within the Indian Ocean as modes of registering the combined and uneven development of the capitalistic world-system. Following the theoretical formulations proposed by the Warwick Research Collective (WreC), the article establishes a counterpoint between the critical debate on world literature and Indian Ocean studies in order to address the Indian Ocean world and its literary forms within a materialist line of thought.