Reclaiming islandness through cloth circulation in Madagascar

Abstract

Perceived as neither Asian nor completely African, often also neglected by island studies, Madagascar long remained the preserve of Francophone scholarship, absent from Anglo- American historical accounts of an Indian Ocean world. This paper examines the place of Madagascar in the literature at the intersection between Indian Ocean studies and textile studies to argue for its relevance in island studies. While decades of historical research have struggled to create a space for the island state and have not made its ‘islandness’ relevant, the paper shows that scholarship focused on Malagasy cloth has successfully re-placed the ‘Great Island’ in an Indian Ocean world and the larger global order, also making it easier to integrate it into a field of island studies that evolved to lend more attention to spatial and relational forces.

Keywords

• cloth
• indian ocean world
• islandness
• islands
• madagascar
• textile