Introduction: performing citizenship and enacting exclusion on Africa's Indian ocean littoral

The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, contingency, and circumstance in shaping and breaking new forms and practices of citizenship and its twin – exclusionary politics – on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral.