Styling multilateralism: Indian Ocean cultural futures

Abstract

The Indian Ocean has long been held to be an important arena for bringing lateral, south-south links into view and hence for theorising the Global South. Yet, how is this vast and abstract idea being given substance in the Indian Ocean world? This article approaches this question from a cultural direction, looking at various cultural formations that address themselves to the Global South. The article makes sense of this material by sorting it into three traditions, high, low and in-between. The first is dominated by themes of mourning and nostalgia for the lost utopias of the third world. By contrast, the low tradition works with idioms of popular culture: slapstick, comedy, consumer excess. If the ‘high’ tradition deals in epic, and the ‘low’ tradition in comedy, then the ‘in-between’ tradition takes account of both, relativising romantic accounts of south-south solidarity as it traces the faultlines within the south.