Commerce with the Universe

Analyzing the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a compelling alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Desai draws on Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, to broaden the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspire a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a discussion of contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the political and cultural life of their postcolonial nations.

Gaurav Desai builds a new history of Africa’s encounter with slavery, colonialism, migration, nationalism, development, and globalization.

Gaurav Desai is professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (2001), editor of Teaching the African Novel (2009), and coeditor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (2005).

Asma Sayed:
Commerce with the Universe provides a detailed and engaging analysis of the Asian literary and cultural encounters in and about East Africa.

Nicolas van de Walle:
Desai's savvy take on the nature of identity in diaspora populations presents readers with a new way to understand the culture of modern East Africa.

Jonathan Walz:
Gaurav Desai sets a high standard for Indian Ocean scholarship.... Commerce with the Universe will interest scholars and students of literary studies, anthropology, history, and postcolonial and area studies. It deserves a prime place in public and private libraries in the literature on Indian Ocean communities and how they shaped one another through connections, contests and cooperation.

Isabel Hofmeyr:
[Commerce with the Universe] is a treasure trove of ideas and information.... This remarkable book will continue to inspire scholars for many years to come.

Pallavi Rastogi:
An excellent book.... Path-breaking, rigorously researched, and elegantly written.

Erudite... richly detailed... Desai explores surprising relationships between Indian businessmen and diasporic Indian culture and touches on class and ethnic relations... Highly recommended.

V. Y. Mudimbe, Duke University:
Commerce with the Universe is a masterful demonstration that Africa belongs also to the Indian Ocean. The ocean and its cultures are in our past and also in our future. This is a magnificent introduction to intercultural implications between the cultures that belong to the Indian Ocean.

R. Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine, author of A Said Dictionary and History, the Human, and the World Between:
Superbly layered and nuanced, Commerce with the Universe is a compelling reading of the imbrication of entangled lives in all their coevalness as well as historical difference. It is a bracing contribution to the emerging episteme of translocal and transregional studies.

Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing:
In Gaurav Desai's capable hands, the Indian Ocean emerges as both a historical and critical contact zone, an area that models how to think in interdisciplinary, historically broad, generically diverse, and critically nuanced ways not just about this particular geography or its shaping of events (slavery, colonialism, migration, trade, decolonization, nationalism, and globalization) but also about the very categories of ethnic history and ethnic identity.

Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky, author of Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics:
Commerce with the Universe offers a smart, engaging, and learned account of the Asian cultural experience in East Africa. The culmination of more than a decade of research, this book is erudite and sophisticated yet eminently readable.