Afrasian entanglements and generic ambiguities in Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai

This article looks at Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai (2012) which focuses on Sakina, a member of the Satpanth Ismaili community living in mid-twentieth century Kenya. Based on nine years of research and interviews with Khoja women who now reside in Western Europe and North America, Bead Bai is generally described as a “historical novel” or an “ethnographic fiction,” yet it also can be thought of as pertaining to the genre of what Brett Smith et al. (2015) call “ethnographic creative nonfiction.” I discuss the ways in which the ‘genre-bending’ aspects of Bead Bai participate in retracing the little-known history of Afrasian entanglements for Asian African women who sorted out, arranged and looked after ethnic beads during colonial times in East Africa. More specifically, I will suggest that, by toying with the boundary between fiction and ethnography, Somjee opens new gendered avenues for reinserting the category of the imaginary at the heart of Afrasian entanglements.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open