The Submerged History of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence

Abstract

Focusing on the satirical stories that the protagonist in Admiring Silence produces, this paper investigates their function as strategies within a submerged history of migration and global movement. I argue that the stories of failed integration and a discredited historical past, when placed within a historical context of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, can be studied as part of the shortcoming of both a Eurocentric and an Afro-centric historiography in relation to societies of the Indian Ocean rim. The protagonist's entanglement in his own stories and his ability to move between the positions of perpetrator and victim as well as between that of the traveller and the one left behind are placed within a context of assimilation and hierarchies of dependence of Indian Ocean societies. In calling our attention to this submerged history, the novel challenges historicist understandings of change and movement and points to the global histories involved in the process of articulating modernity.