Commerce with the Universe - by Gaurav Desai (Paperback)

About the Book

Gaurav Desai builds a new history of Africa's encounter with slavery, colonialism, migration, nationalism, development, and globalization.

Book Synopsis

Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.

Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.

Review Quotes

Commerce with the Universe provides a detailed and engaging analysis of the Asian literary and cultural encounters in and about East Africa.--Asma Sayed "South Asian Diaspora"

[Commerce with the Universe] is a treasure trove of ideas and information.... This remarkable book will continue to inspire scholars for many years to come.--Isabel Hofmeyr "Africa"

An excellent book.... Path-breaking, rigorously researched, and elegantly written.--Pallavi Rastogi "Research in African Literatures"

Desai's savvy take on the nature of identity in diaspora populations presents readers with a new way to understand the culture of modern East Africa.--Nicolas van de Walle "Foreign Affairs"

Erudite... richly detailed... Desai explores surprising relationships between Indian businessmen and diasporic Indian culture and touches on class and ethnic relations... Highly recommended.-- "Choice"

Gaurav Desai sets a high standard for Indian Ocean scholarship.... Commerce with the Universe will interest scholars and students of literary studies, anthropology, history, and postcolonial and area studies. It deserves a prime place in public and private libraries in the literature on Indian Ocean communities and how they shaped one another through connections, contests and cooperation.--Jonathan Walz "The Indian Economic and Social History Review"

Commerce with the Universe is a masterful demonstration that Africa belongs also to the Indian Ocean. The ocean and its cultures are in our past and also in our future. This is a magnificent introduction to intercultural implications between the cultures that belong to the Indian Ocean.--V. Y. Mudimbe, Duke University

Commerce with the Universe offers a smart, engaging, and learned account of the Asian cultural experience in East Africa. The culmination of more than a decade of research, this book is erudite and sophisticated yet eminently readable.--Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky, author of Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

In Gaurav Desai's capable hands, the Indian Ocean emerges as both a historical and critical contact zone, an area that models how to think in interdisciplinary, historically broad, generically diverse, and critically nuanced ways not just about this particular geography or its shaping of events (slavery, colonialism, migration, trade, decolonization, nationalism, and globalization) but also about the very categories of ethnic history and ethnic identity.--Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Superbly layered and nuanced, Commerce with the Universe is a compelling reading of the imbrication of entangled lives in all their coevalness as well as historical difference. It is a bracing contribution to the emerging episteme of translocal and transregional studies.--R. Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine, author of A Said Dictionary and History, the Human, and the World Between

About the Author

Gaurav Desai is professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (2001), editor of Teaching the African Novel (2009), and coeditor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (2005).