The aqueous form and the Afro–Sino encounter in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

Abstract

ABSTRACTThrough a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.KEYWORDS: Oceanic studiesAfrica–China relationsGlobal South studiesYvonne OwuorKenyan literatureIndo-Pacific waters Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. See, for example, Charne Lavery (Citation2017). This article also aims to bring together the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds, and explores how bridging the two oceans might complicate our understanding of south–south solidarity. However, by contrast, Lavery analyses more how the south writes back to the north.2. Africa’s oceanic tie with the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world, in the form of transatlantic slavery or indentured servitude, is well documented in Atlantic studies and Indian Ocean studies. For a discussion of how literatures represent the South Seas (Nanyang) in East Asian studies, see Brian Bernards (Citation2015).3. Karen Laura Thornber’s (Citation2016) study highlights travel of people and ideas between Africa and China from the 8th century to the present, but hardly mentions the ocean space that enables these journeys. Thornber also notes that the transportation of slaves and labourers between Africa and China during European imperialism is a rarely discussed topic (703), a research gap that justifies a hydro-critical reading of Afro–Chinese relations. (Re)visiting those interactions from the Indo-Pacific waters might help salvage minor (hi)stories that remain illegible to the terrestrial mind.4. Unless otherwise noted, translations of French and Chinese texts in this article are my own.5. After defaulting on its loans in late 2017, the Sri Lankan government negotiated with China and “handed over the [Hambantota] port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years” (Abi-Habib Citation2018). East African countries like Djibouti have mounting debts with China and are faced with similar situations (Gopaldas Citation2018).6. This article refers to a different ocean from Baucom’s, whose reflection on historical philosophy stems from the specific context of the Middle Passage. However, capitalism and its regulation of space-time are global phenomena whose influence permeates both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.7. For instance, when studying the relations between Victorian fiction and Darwinian thought, George Levine (Citation1988) suggests that “Victorian gradualism” was manifested at the scientific, political, and aesthetic levels and “was the groundwork of 19th-century ‘realism’” (5). For Georg Lukacs (Citation1964), realism is a genre fundamentally about human agency and human history. In the realist novel, the individual establishes an “organic, indissoluble connection” with society. “The central aesthetic problem of realism”, Lukács argues, “is the adequate presentation of the complete human personality” (7–8).Additional informationNotes on contributorsSiwei WangSiwei Wang is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Previously, she obtained an MA in English at Georgetown University. Her current research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxism and materialist criticism, environmental humanities, and aesthetic theory.