The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories
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 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 an exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this...
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"This path-breaking book makes novel and riveting connections between scientists and occultists in the West and Tamil nationalists in India. Ramaswamy's history of the fabulous and lost continent of Lemuria is a brilliant demonstration of how imagination travels."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference"Sumathi Ramaswamy's important book is sure to ignite fresh interest in the place of lost lands in the modern imaginary. Her fascinating account of the least known of these—Lemuria—breathes new life into the centrality of 'labors of loss' in nationalist historiography. In refusing to dismiss such narratives as eccentric and inconsequential, Ramaswamy compels scholars to look anew at the fabulous and occult in order to understand the shaping of scientific and colonial modernity. Impeccably researched and elegantly written, this is altogether a marvelous read."—Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief
1Placing loss12Science in the service of loss193Occult losses534Living loss at land's end975Flooding history1376Mapping loss1827Laboring against loss223
