Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination

Abstract

Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. By Gaurav Desai. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv, 291; selected references, index. $50.00/£34.50 cloth, $49.99/£34.50 e-book.In his second book, literary scholar Gaurav Desai seeks to illuminate the relationship of Africa and Asia through a close reading of a selection of texts by East African Asian authors. While much of what he has to say will be familiar to historians of Indian Ocean Africa, his approach will challenge them to think more deeply about these questions, in particular about the two key texts with which he bookends his study, Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land, and M.G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack3In reaching beyond these two widely used texts by teachers of East African and Indian Ocean history, Desai wishes "to help generate a discussion of significant texts written by Asians about their experiences in East Africa that still remain under the scholarly radar" (p. 13). These are several "life narratives" (p. 11) of prominent Asians whose engagement in trade and business stands at the center of their stories. Buried in a footnote to Chapter 4 is a comment about his use of colloquial terms like "African," "Indian," and "Asian" that will, I think, be of even greater import to readers of this journal: "The larger point of my project is, of course, to rethink all of these terms-to think both of Africa as a multiracial space and to recognize that the Indian or Asian in Africa is best thought of in Afrasian terms" (p. 244, n.18).The book consists of seven chapters and a coda. Chapter 1 begins with the positioning of Asians in works by various African writers whose works provide an opening for questioning racially-based concepts of nationalism and citizenship in Africa. Desai embraces "an expansive understanding of African territories and identities" (p. 6), and asks, "how African places, people, and ideas influence their [Asian writers] social and textual lives" (p. 8). Chapter 2 navigates the waters of Ghosh's always challenging text that interweaves both anthropology and history while juxtaposing medieval Egypt, Aden, and Malabar with modem Egypt. Through his dense reading Desai regards Ghosh's perspective as a kind of "nostalgic optimism" (p. 34) based on a reconstruction of "history in the nostalgic mode" (p. 35). Chapter 3 may test the less theoretically savvy among us, but the author's wide-ranging overview of the literature produced by Afrasians offers a thoughtful perspective on the individual lives that he examines in greater detail from their life narratives in the following three chapters.Chapter 4 draws upon two accounts by Indian travelers in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 One of these was originally published in Gujarati, the other translated from that language long after its author penned it. Both are fascinating and will be of particular interest to economic historians. Their engagement with Africa and their visions of modernity raise many interesting questions. …