Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: New conjunctures in maritime imaginaries / Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal -- Fabulation : flying carpets and artful politics in the Indian Ocean / Stephen Muecke -- The Indian Ocean and the making of outback Australia : an ecocultural odyssey / Haripriya Rangan and Christian Kull -- Contesting history : have we ever been cosmopolitan? / Shanti Moorthy -- Destined to disappear without a trace : gender and the languages of creolisation in the Indian Ocean, Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean / Fernando Rosa Ribeiro -- Commerce, circulation, and consumption : Indian Ocean communities in historical perspective / Lakshmi Subramanian -- Shared hopes, new worlds : Indians, Australians & Indonesians in the boycott of Dutch shipping, 1945-1949 / Heather Goodall -- "Signs of wonder" : the postmortem travels of Francis Xavier in the Indian Ocean world / Pamila Gupta -- Kuo Pao Kun's descendants of the eunuch admiral and the myth of modern Singapore / Susan Philip -- "The great ocean of idealism" : Calcutta, the Tagore circle, and the idea of Asia, 1900-1920 / Mark Ravinder Frost -- "Is it the same sea as back home"? : transformative complicities as traveling tropes in fictions from Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and South Africa / Miki Flockemann -- Making home on the Indian Ocean rim : re-locations in South African literatures / Meg Samuelson -- A traveling science : anthropometry and colonialism in the Indian Ocean / Rochelle Pinto -- Whiteness in golden Goa : Linschoten on phenotype / Arun Saldanha -- Power and beliefs in Reunion Island / Christian Ghasarian -- Through magical flowers : tourism and Creole self-fashioning in La Reunion / David Picard -- Black bag / Ashraf Jamal -- Telling and selling on the Indian Ocean rim / Ashraf Jamal -- Post-orientalism / Stephen Muecke.