Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination by Gaurav Desai (review)

Commerce with the Universe, which was awarded the ACLA’s prestigious René Wellek Prize in 2014, may have come on the heels of a number of scholarly books in the somewhat newish field of “Indian Ocean Studies.” Yet, Desai’s book is not simply an addition to an existing oeuvre of knowledge about African and Asian encounters. It is a stunning intervention in a rapidly growing discipline, which has already taken hold in history, sociology, politics, and anthropology, and has only recently claimed its rightful space in interdisciplinary literary studies. Commerce with the Universe is, therefore, a literary tour-de-force, especially in the way it uses a vast array of interdisciplinary and archival materials to trace centuries of exchange between Africans and Asians, through slavery, colonialism, commerce, trade, and the ocean space itself.

Desai opens his magisterial account of “the Afrasian imagination” by asking not only “what Africanists might gain from an eastwards glance,” but also “what scholars of the Indian Ocean gain by placing Africa more centrally in their accounts” (7). When Africanists look eastwards or “scholars of the Indian Ocean” look toward Africa, what they see—and what connects them, of course—is the vast expanse of the ocean. The trope of the Indian Ocean, and the commercial activities circulating in and around its waters, organize this book. As Desai argues, they are profoundly generative of rich cultural contact stretching across centuries.

The book’s introduction, cleverly titled “Ocean and Narration,” discusses the central importance of the ocean in Indian and African exchanges through what Desai calls a “transoceanic perspective” (8). Desai also studies how transoceanic exchanges facilitated various independence movements, particularly in Asia. Chapter 2 focuses on Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. While highlighting medieval cosmopolitanism and cultural acceptance, Desai doesn’t uncritically celebrate Ghosh’s depiction of those ideas. Instead he warns us against nostalgia toward what he calls “the modern loss of this religiously plural world” (29). He also seeks to connect two different time periods—the modern and the medieval—through a series of overarching questions in this chapter.

Commerce with the Universe then moves to study the self-representation of Asians in East Africa. Again, a literary giant, M. G. Vassanji, hovers over this enterprise but Desai never lets him occlude the “minor”—I do not use the word pejoratively here—histories his book excavates. Desai focuses on lesser-known texts from a vast array of interdisciplinary resources in order to give us a fuller picture of Asians in Africa and also how they “resonate with … Ghosh’s Indian Ocean tale” (13). While these chapters are rich with historical and political context, the section on “Asian African Literatures: Genealogies in the Making” is by far the most interesting (75), especially the way it sets up the closer readings that follow in the next chapters, which examine Asian nonfiction and fiction about East Africa.

In chapter 4, “Through Indian Eyes: Travel and the Performance of Ethnicity,” Desai studies two Indians who went to East Africa in the first part of the 20th century: Ebrahimji Adamji and Sorabji Darookhanawala. This chapter is followed by another section on three autobiographies about Asian life in East Africa. The last chapter is an exploration of writings by three Asians who were asked by President Nyerere to help create the new nation of Tanganiyika (152). The chapter thus shows how Asians in East Africa were active participants in the project of nation-construction the way they were, as is more generally known, in South Africa.

The last chapter analyzes Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, which Desai views as encapsulating the rich history of Asian identity in East Africa. The book ends with a coda that adumbrates its intervention—to show how Asians in Africa have attempted to engage in a cultural politics “beyond that of the color line” (215), a project that Desai executes admirably well. This is an excellent book, which...