A01=Sumathi Ramaswamy
africa
anthropology
antiquity
archaeology
art history
atlantis
australia
Author_Sumathi Ramaswamy
Category=JBG
charles darwin
civilization
colonial
colonialism
darwinism
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
evolution
geographic
geography
geology
grief
himalayas
indian ocean
lemuria
loss
maps
occult
occultism
pacific ocean
racism
regional
tamil
tibet
utopian
world history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520244405
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Sep 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the first to explore Lemuria's incarnations across cultures, from Victorian-era science to Euro-American occultism to colonial and postcolonial India. The Lost Land of Lemuria widens into a provocative exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this sentiment manifests itself in a fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. More than a consideration of nostalgia, it shows how ideas once entertained but later discarded in the metropole can travel to the periphery - and can be appropriated by those seeking to construct a meaningful world within the disenchantment of modernity. Sumathi Ramaswamy ultimately reveals how loss itself has become a condition of modernity, compelling us to rethink the politics of imagination and creativity in our day.
Sumathi Ramaswamy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, editor of Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (2003), and author of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891--1970 (California, 1997).
