Translocal Relations across the Indian Ocean. An introduction

This chapters explores the ways in which Swahili speakers have been portrayed by the outsiders and have portrait themselves in a range of geographical areas, from Somalia to Mozambique along the Indian Ocean and, out of Africa, in Europe and the US. It describes the worlds where Swahili language is spoken as multi-centred contexts that cannot be thought of as located in a specific coastal area of Kenya or Tanzania. The aim of this piece is to de-essentialize the concepts of translocality and cosmopolitanism by putting emphasis on translocality as experienced by different social strata, including slaves, and by gender and by showing cosmopolitanism as an acquired attitude rather than an individual character.