Author: Françoise Vergès.

The islands of the Indian Ocean offer a space from which postcolonial scholars might revise African and European metadiscourses. Africa has been looking west and north since the first deportation of Africans. I propose to look east and head south, to the Indian Ocean, the seas and the lands, a site of intercontinental trade and travel, conversion and conquest, migration and creolization. Mapping the Indian Ocean reveals a cartology of transoceanic transactions and exchanges, past and present. Africa meets India, South and East Asia, the Islamic world, and the islands. It is a cartology of trans-South flows: East Asia/Africa, South Asia/Africa, Islands/Africa, and of connections with the Americas and Europe.