Monsoon fever

The monsoon provides a useful spatial template for thinking more generally about the future direction(s) of Indian Ocean studies. Precisely because of its defining character – it connects water and sky, and links geography (specifically climate and climate change) with politics and development – it allows us to engage with the “oceanic” more seriously. In addition, the monsoon offers a point for reflection on connectivity – that is, on how people, things, and ideas travel in a changing Indian Ocean world. This paper is a discussion of the monsoon in its many registers – as an annual storm system unique to the Indian Ocean (Pearson 2003); as a (lyrical and embodied) aesthetic that provides a way to trace what is in the process of being lost in the face of dramatic environmental change (Frater 1991); and finally as a security measure, or “development discourse” (Kaplan 2010) in a changing political and economic climate wherein the Indian Ocean is poised as the next strategic arena in a post-American world (Hofmeyr 2009). Each register, in turn, will have consequences for thinking anew about the temperate future(s) of Indian Ocean studies by asking conceptual questions about the vestigial and the imminent.