Description:
Abstract:In recent years, several attempts to revitalize Area Studies have concentrated on oceans as the unifying force to create regions. In this respect, the Indian Ocean has become a prime example to show how economic as well as cultural flows across the sea have contributed to close connections between its shores. However, by doing so, they not only seem to create a certain, rather homogeneous, Indian Ocean space, they often also lead to a conceptual separation between “coast” and “hinterland,” similar to earlier distinctions between “African/Arab” or “East/Central Africa.” In this contribution, so-called “Arab” traders who settled along trade routes connecting the East African coast to its hinterland will serve as an empirical ground to explore and challenge these boundaries. Tracing maritime imaginaries and related materialities in the Tanzanian interior, it will reflect on the ends of the Indian Ocean and the nature of such maritime conceptualizations of space more generally. By taking the relational thinking that lies at the ground of maritimity inland, it wishes to encourage a re-conceptualization of areas that not only replaces a terrestrial spatial entity with a maritime one, but that genuinely breaks with such “container-thinking” and, instead, foregrounds the meandering, fluid character of regions and their complex and highly dynamic entanglements.