The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies

Mar di India

2026-07-24T15:26:29-04:00

The map records the Australian coastal discoveries (Terra del Zur) made between 1619 and 1627, as its inscriptions attest ("I. de Edels Landt det. 1619"; "Landt vande Leeuwin det. 1622"; "Landt van P. Nuyts det. 26 Jan 1627"), yet it omits Tasman's findings of 1642 to 1644. It appeared in Janssonius' atlas, issued at Amsterdam in 1650 and again in 1657.

Mar di India. [Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, between 1650 and 1657]. GF 227, pièce 14. Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne. https://nubis.bis-sorbonne.fr/ark:/15733/3g0m.

The Indian Ocean as an (Un)common Place of Transformation: Challenges and Potentialities Beyond Blue Economy Policies in the Comoros Islands

2026-05-22T11:15:09-04:00

This article examines the Comoros as a critical site for rethinking the Indian Ocean beyond dominant blue economy narratives. Through ethnographic engagement with artisanal fishermen, it explores how everyday maritime practices, sensory knowledge, and oceanic imaginaries complicate policy-driven visions of sustainable development. While blue economy discourse frames the Indian Ocean as a frontier of sustainable growth, in the Comoros, it intersects with longer histories of marginalization, failed development schemes, illegal extraction, and uneven global market integration. Artisanal fishers occupy a paradoxical position: historically stigmatized within social hierarchies yet newly targeted by conservation and maritime development initiatives. Their experiences reveal continuities between the economization of the sea and contemporary sustainability agendas, challenging the presumed rupture between exploitative and ecological paradigms. The Comorian artisanal fishers’ ways of inhabiting, perceiving, and imagining the sea offer a situated lens through which to interrogate the expanding blue economy in the Western Indian Ocean. By tracing ethnographic assemblages that emerge from everyday maritime practices, this article explores how global conservation and restoration policies intersect with local histories of marginality, ecological knowledge, and social identity. In so doing, it shows how the Comoros—positioned within a wider Indian Ocean seascape—becomes a site where oceanic futures are negotiated through both vulnerability and possibility, revealing the sea as a material, imaginative, and political space.

Of Fatwas and Phonographs: Remapping Technological Modernity across the Indian Ocean World, c. 1899-1932

2026-07-24T15:09:14-04:00

Bridging methods of historical ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean history, this article weaves a global history of the phonograph by foregrounding cultural and legal circulations within Muslim Indian Ocean networks at the dawn of the twentieth century. Firstly, the article demonstrates how Muslim consumers and producers of musical entertainments and recitational practices operated within long-standing pilgrimage, trade, and literary networks between the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia and, furthermore, how these networks facilitated the early global spread of the phonograph: a technology that gave rise to popular music industry and global media capitalism. Secondly, and in addition to referencing archival phonograph recordings, the article explores how the circulation of phonograph technologies, vocal recitational practices, and musical “instruments of amusement” were debated by Islamic jurists whose legal traditions occupied the same Indian Ocean cultural geography between Arabia and Southeast Asia. By focusing on fatwas published in Java by an Arab Hadhrami jurist named Sayyid ‘Uthman b. Yahya (1822-1914), the article complicates previous scholarly framings of fatwas on the phonograph as a clash between “Islam” and “Modernity” or “the West,” instead framing his fatwas as a response to the early phonograph industry’s success in catering to preexisting vernacular entertainment markets on Muslim networks of the IOW. Additionally, the article suggests that global media capitalism’s spread depended on and became intertwined with what Rajat Kanta Ray (1994) defined as “intermediate spheres” of capital outside the West, in this case long-standing markets for recitation and musical performance within maritime networks. Thus, the article contributes to scholarship that challenges Western exceptionalism in historical narratives of modernity pertaining to media, law, and economy, and to scholarship that understands the modern IOW as a global space shaped by many historical layers of technological globalization and cultural circulation.