Australianama
Subtitle: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9781849049696
Subjects: East indians, foreign countries; Australia, history; Ethnology, australia
Description: Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a 19th-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonised by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people.