This workshop seeks to structure an inter-regional conversation between Mauritian and southern African oceanic literary traditions.  Working within a framework of literary ecologies, the workshop aims to examine historical, aesthetic and environmental themes from a global south perspective.  The focus on southern Africa and Mauritius highlights two historically inter-related regions within the Indian Ocean world but which are seldom brought into conversation.   

The project draws on recent work from oceanic literary scholars that pioneers a post-human perspective, utilizing ideas like amphibious aesthetics; littoral form; monsoon assemblages; heavy waters; hydropoetics; underwater aesthetics; trans-corporeality; and sea ontologies, all concepts that push us closer to a material engagement with water. Caribbean debates on oceanic ecologies will provide a comparative reference point while themes of media map-making in the contemporary Indian Ocean will be important.