Author: Meg Samuelson.

A number of post‐apartheid literary works revisit nineteenth‐ to early twentieth‐century Indian Ocean passages. Bringing into visibility South Africa’s other ocean – until recently largely occluded by the conceptual bedazzlement of the black Atlantic – they unsettle some of the paradigms through which it has been imagined. This article explores five such novels, which articulate or critique various citizenship claims through a poetics of (un)settlement. One strand from this cluster employs rhetorical strategies such as an ‘Atlantic register’ to translate oceanic routes into territorial roots, mobility into autochthony; the other registers a more unsettled state as it scrutinises the gendered politics of home‐making and national belonging, and issues a retort to the multicultural imagination.