The lost land of Lemuria : fabulous geographies, catastrophic histories
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The lost land of Lemuria : fabulous geographies, catastrophic histories
(A Philip E. Lilienthal book)
University of California Press, c2004
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. 297-324
Includes index
Contents of Works
- Placing loss
- Science in the service of loss
- Occult losses
- Living loss at land's end
- Flooding history
- Mapping loss
- Laboring against loss
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 elegantly written 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 a provocative exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this sentiment manifests itself in a fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. More than a consideration of nostalgia, it shows how ideas once entertained but later discarded in the metropole can travel to the periphery - and can be appropriated by those seeking to construct a meaningful world within the disenchantment of modernity. Sumathi Ramaswamy ultimately reveals how loss itself has become a condition of modernity, compelling us to rethink the politics of imagination and creativity in our day.
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