The Arabic word musafir resonates with stunning phonetic consistency across languages that now mark strikingly different cultural spaces, from Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, Malay, and Uygur, among others, in a vast, uninterrupted geography. While the original meaning in most of these languages is that of a ‘traveller’, in Turkish and Romanian it has come to designate a ‘guest’, a position that is special and most welcomed. In Romanian, in particular, musafir resonates within the privilege of the domestic realm, a word mostly reserved for a guest who is received into one’s home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests is thus rooted in efforts to make possible a world where travellers arrive and are received as guests. It follows worlds as they have been braided by intrepid travellers, by unwillingly displaced individuals and communities in history, as well as by the growing migratory movements of today. These are the worlds that open when one leaves the familiar confines of one’s corner of the world, and the many artistic conversations that are born on the cusps of these encounters.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests speaks from the present moment, taking into account current manifestations of much older tensions around who is welcomed and who is not, which perspectives are welcomed and which are not, and who gets to decide on these limits. Public conversations and contemporary politics in many contexts, with Germany among the starkest examples, have become increasingly filled with anxiety over perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world from those respective narrow local contexts. As such, the exhibition constitutes an urgent plea to acknowledge and assert the polyphonic worlds brought together by the experiences of those who have moved past their points of origin.

To get there, the exhibition needs to make a few detours (an experience familiar to many travellers)—more through time than geography. Journeys and quests have been fundamental in the imagination of personal becoming, as many enduring stories as well as debates in the field of narratology point to. But while embarking on a wandering quest might be decisive for the composition of one’s sense of self, so it might also be for developing a coherent imagination of the world. Thus, one such detour is through the long tradition of imagining a universality developed outside the project of the European Enlightenment. This entails thinking of the world as one, of models of communality and shared humanity that are not compromised by their genealogy in European universal thinking, with its colonial and racist premises and consequences. Rather, this detour looks to how exactly this appeared through the perspectives of people who have left their worlds of origin. It would be difficult for such a conversation not to take into account one of the most significant historical moments in this regard, which had been largely overlooked until recently, when the work of historian José Lingna Nafafé began to bring it rightful recognition.[1]

On 6 March 1684, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, a prince from the royal house of the Kingdom of Ndongo (present-day Angola), presented a case against slavery at the Vatican. A traveller and universalist, his story prior to this extraordinary moment is itself remarkable. Upon the defeat of his family’s rebellion against the Portuguese imposition of a tax on enslaved human beings in their kingdom, he was sent into exile to Brazil, where he encountered Black and Indigenous resistance against the colonial regime. Fearful of his increasing activism in Brazil, the Portuguese further exiled him to Lisbon, where he made contact with communities of Amerindians, Africans, and Jewish conversos while engaging in study. This unique itinerary led him to file a case against the Vatican in its own courts—a winning case no less, albeit without immediate consequences beyond Pope Innocent XI’s condemnation of slavery two years after. But the truly historic dimension of this moment lies in the arguments formulated by Mendonça in his plea, which relied on a notion of rights shared by all human beings, ‘Jews, pagans, or Christians on every land in the world’—a century prior to the white abolitionist movement and predating the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century. With this knowledge established, what route should be taken in the questioning of notions previously attributed to the European Enlightenment, including the rightfully challenged notion of ‘human rights’, often criminally instrumentalized under the US-American consensus, knowing that it was first uttered by a prince from Ndongo in 1684, when he spoke on behalf of all humanity?

Further amongst the starting points from which the exhibition departs are a few historical references. They may point to art histories distinct from a European-driven, geographically circumscribed understanding of the world through a particular strain of adulterated universalism. They are informed by several historical examples of universal perspectives outside European lineages—from cities of the world, empires, and the vast geographies woven around them—as well as by artists who have built or revealed worlds that spoke of a larger world within their own practice. While geographically incomplete and subjected to the pitfalls and violence of imperial projects of their own, these examples point to ways in which different peoples, customs, goods, religions, and cosmologies came together in one place under an imagined coherent programme of the world. They complicate both the vision of a singular universalism as a European project and that of a world divided into irreconcilable cosmologies. This retrospective exercise is not meant to idealize any of these historical moments, nor to use them as models for the future, which would have to be constantly invented and negotiated in a world that is vastly different. They nevertheless remind us that there is a shared inheritance of thinking the world as a common home for humanity in different places and times that have not been fundamentally tainted by expansion and subjugation, as the European project largely has. Such examples of lived cosmopolitanism might include, alongside the tricontinental world of Mendonça, the Mughal world at its climax with its imperial encyclopaedic pursuit of knowledge and worldly aesthetic accumulation, as well as multi-confessional statecraft; the vast and complex portuary world of commerce around the Indian Ocean in the centuries preceding European resetting of power along its shores; the long land routes of commodities, faith, and knowledge in Western and Northern Africa; or the first iteration of a globalized economic system in the multi-confessional space organized in the steppes of Northern and Central Asia by different Mongol, Turkic, and Persianate regimes.

With macro histories ever present as a backdrop, Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests primarily concerns itself with micro stories, with many works focusing on individuals who have embarked on travels across the world or realized projects that gather encyclopaedic knowledge from across cultural contexts and perspectives. Both at a macro and micro level, the exhibition is visited by the spirit of Mendonça as a traveller and builder of universality. It considers periods and individuals that predate or fall outside of modern colonial eras, overshadowed as they have been by Eurocentric historiography and the liberal myth of the heroic individual and the ethos of the traveller as a devourer of worlds. In considering the aforementioned examples of pre-modern universalities, the challenge of devising an apparatus able to do historic justice to the majority of anonymous travellers who, through their toil and labour, have built and sustained the world of global capital, is taken up. These travellers are the enslaved individuals of the Great Crossing, indentured labourers from India, China, and Indonesia who went to the Americas as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These travellers are the migrants of today; not just those still moving towards imperial cores, but also those set on trajectories opened up by changing economic geographies, from South Asia towards the Gulf region, from South East Asia towards East Asia, from across the African continent (and Southern Europe) towards Southern Africa, from the Andes to Brazil, and from Venezuela towards the rest of Latin America.

Thus, more than in the visions of worlding developed as imperial policy or as a direct consequence of it, Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests is invested in individual visions developed by travellers—known, less known, or entirely forgotten—who left their own locales, connecting them with other worldly cities as well as the universal histories they enacted and registered. These musafiri—travellers who transformed themselves as guests, taking root in places they went to—imagined and transformed the world in their own ways, accounting for a world beyond their own, and perhaps even for a world beyond their travels.

One of the most illustrious travellers and chroniclers was Ibn Battuta (the fourteenth-century author of The Rihla or A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling), who voyaged from his native Tangier all the way to China, following maritime routes already known to the merchants who frequented the waters that connected the Arab world, East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay islands, and China. One of the travellers on these routes was Sa’id of Mogadishu, a scholar who translated between Chinese and Somali and provided Ibn Battuta with crucial knowledge about China upon their meeting on the Indian Coast. Much earlier on, we encounter Zhang Qian (Han Dynasty, second century BCE) who was perhaps the first traveller in Central Asia to bring back to China knowledge of the remnants of the Hellenistic world and its origin further West. Another lesser-known traveller is Buddhaguptanatha, a sixteenth-century Tamil yogi from Rameswaram hailing from a Buddhist community that has long been believed to have disappeared by then in Southern India, who travelled around the Asian and East African coasts.

Other travellers remain entirely nameless. Many voyages and processes of documenting have happened over many centuries (from at least the sixteenth century right until the beginning of the twentieth) on a route linking the port city of Makassar in today’s Indonesia and many Indigenous communities along the Northern shores of what would come to be called Australia. Organized around the trade of sea cucumbers, which would be further shipped all the way to China, this connection resulted in many long lasting cultural and economic traces on both sides, including visual, oral, and choreographic chronicles of these travels.

Not only the authors of these chronicles, but also their precious manuscripts travelled. The most monumental of documents, attempting to be a universal treatise of history and knowledge, must be Jāmiʻ al-Tawārīkh, written in Tabriz in the early fourteenth century by Rashid al-Din. Bolad, a Mongol who served at the Yuan court in China, became an important collaborator with Rashid al-Din, helping with the translation of medical and cosmological materials from China into Persian and Arabic, with some of his work arriving early on at the Ottoman Court. From there came another extraordinary figure, Evliya Çelebi, who travelled across and beyond the Ottoman world of the seventeenth century, documenting it in his book of travels, Seyahâtnâme. Read from today’s vantage point, it offers a refreshing return of gaze towards Europe, which was then at the beginning of its imperial project. But in its candid, insightful, and often humorous text, we see many other paths and stories: a linguistic meditation on the connections between German and Persian long before the Indo-European language family was proposed in linguistics; the appearance of a Sufi practitioner riding a rhinoceros along the Nile; a mention of Miguel de Cervantes as that ‘one-armed Spanish slave’; the testimony of a group of Native Americans Çelebi met in Rotterdam who had cursed the European priests, ‘Our world used to be peaceful, but greedy people have filled it, men of this world [the Old World] who make war every year and shorten our lives’; as well as an account of a thriving and populated land of Palestinians whose life, culture, and lands are described in rich details.

The story of Xuan Zang, the seventh-century Tang Monk’s journey to the west (towards the lands of the Buddha, in today’s India and Nepal), has become a household staple in China and East Asia, yielding numerous adaptations across artistic genres, from opera to TV series, cinema to acrobatics. The Monkey King, the trickster who can travel 10,000 miles with a somersault in the fantastic retelling of Xuan Zang’s historic voyage by Ming Dynasty writer Wu Chen’en, extends the Buddhist sacred journey in pursuit of the scripture to that of socio-political sarcasm, a tradition continued by contemporary iterations, notably in Hong Kong cinema, which itself spread across continents.

This last point brings in other voyages and flows. Like those films and TV series that have helped spread Chinese mythology and religious stories to centres of the diaspora and beyond, forming new generations and shaping their identities, many communities of musafiri have been re-enforced and further bound together by the circulation of episodes of religion and common history narrated through popular culture. The exhibition points to several such flows: from the current moment of K-pop, which is remaking taste, identification, beauty standards, or ideas of race across Asia and other continents, to the earlier moment of global entanglements that formed around the lambada craze of 1989, which in turn came on the heels of the cultural and sonic universes born on both sides of the Black Atlantic that have fundamentally reshaped the very idea of global pop culture. The exhibition is further interested in other spaces around which diasporas have been built, in communal places of identification—where travellers can feel like guests, even if just to each other—in the geographies of arrival for many musafiri. Often intertwined with but separate from spaces designed for tourists (those other travellers of the modern era), these are markets, nail and hair salons, and cafes—spaces where communities of support flourish and self-narrate.

Long before popular culture spread, culture and ideas travelled widely, transforming the very routes they circulated upon. If the first voyages followed the pull of desire for commodities, knowledge, beliefs, and aesthetics accompanied them. These processes can be seen around textiles, for example, which weave together historical traces, layers, and tensions, encompassing profoundly and seamlessly in their own fibre the technological knowledge that led to their making, through many stages of transformation of natural elements. These include the social relations and economic structures that assigned value to their making and circulation, such as the pluricontinental and often dark histories of indigo or cochineal dyes, as well as the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual systems that made them objects to be read, understood, to be received in awe or delight—all while reflecting the subjective and unique voice of their makers. Few other languages have reflected these systems as they travelled, circulated, migrated, and were exchanged along trade routes and lines of contact, like textiles have.

It would be difficult however to surpass the movements and circulations that have been facilitated by religion across continents. It is also within these systems that most visions of universalism have been assembled. Many of the individual travellers we are remembering here followed the routes afforded by religious kinship, while borrowing their systems of making sense of the world. In the process, many of them have shaped them further or even left them behind, upon encountering the complexities of the world as it actually appeared to them along the way. Among the traces of these paths in the exhibition are allusions to the journeys made by itinerant Sufi saints. But religion is also the driving force behind some of the most significant, if often overlooked, systems of contemporary movement of people, the pilgrimages, often involving millions of people for whom this counts as one of the most crucial moments in their lives, including the Hajj or Kumbh Mela.

But if many of these itineraries largely describe geographies outside of the European colonial project, cartographies assembled free from the latitudes of exploration and conquest, what can be said of the journeys made by those who could not avoid the grasp of this power? Those whose journeys were swept alongside those waves of conquest, or were undertaken against them—to different degrees—in a world already shaped by them? Such journeys include that of Enrique de Malacca, the enslaved Filipino who in practice enabled Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to circumnavigate the world, and was in fact the first individual to have made such a journey. Another is that undertaken by Abba Gorgoryos, the Ethiopian scholar who travelled to Gotha in the seventeenth century for academic work and tragically died in a shipwreck while on a journey back to Ethiopia. Then there is Matthew Henson, the African-American explorer, born a year after the end of that country’s Civil War, likely the first recorded person to have reached the North Pole. A discordant figure in our story perhaps, Henson was, to a large extent, embedded in the US imperial expansionist project. However, his success came after learning from Inuit communities their language and the knowledge to survive and navigate the Arctic; connections he likely established on different terms than those of white explorers.

Or the last King of Hawaiʻi, Kalākaua, who in 1881 embarked on a round-the-world trip to establish diplomatic contacts with states and communities that were facing, like his nation, European colonial encroachment (as well as, less illustriously, to encourage the importation of contract labour for royal plantations). King Kalākaua was also incited by the concept of the Malay race and its political future, or, in the words of the US Consul, ‘inflamed by the idea of gathering all the cognate races of the Islands of the Pacific into a great Polynesian Confederacy’,[2] a political project based on a radically different mental geography of the Pacific, one that was to be violently redrawn in ways that also led to his nation’s obliteration. One might even speculate if Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal’s imagined community of Malay races, or the early visions of revolutionary students who invented Indonesia as a new community bringing together different groups in the archipelago, owe part of their creation to King Kalākaua’s desire to establish a Pan-Polynesian confederacy.

But through all these journeys, even through those traced when the focus turns away from European colonial travellers, the world imagined remains unavoidably fragmentary and necessarily incomplete. However, the structural absence of women’s perspectives from vast swathes of history fundamentally limits the possibilities of this perspective. And how to account for the experiences of those forcibly brought across the Middle Passage, the ten million enslaved persons of all genders who survived it? They were the first to see the modern global world—built through their kidnapping and exploitation—and their experience necessarily haunts contemporary narrations of the world. And how to account for the experience of the indentured labourers, who supplemented the labour deficit following the legal abolition of slavery from the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century? And how to account for those who continue to supplement it today?

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests calls attention to those stories rendered invisible in the ‘underside’ of globalization, namely those of migrant workers—the anonymous builders of infrastructure, the logistics workers, and the ‘essential workers’ (to use recent pandemic verbiage), either in the far away cities of their own countries (such as the tens of millions of internal migrants who have left rural areas for the Chinese metropolises), in the newly developed regional axes of migration, or along the more historical imperial routes. The works in the exhibition similarly give voice to the accounts of the people who ensure these very flows, such as the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who form around thirty percent of the total staff of the entire shipping world—resonating perhaps with the pioneering journey of Enrique de Malacca. Finally, the exhibition traces the journeys of those who have been forced, by sheer coercion or circumstances, to leave their homes and take up arms in faraway places under foreign flags. The breadth of these experiences is vast—from East Africans of many generations who eventually found homes across South Asia to the millions who fought for colonial empires in world wars; from the Gurkhas employed around the British Empire to the Nepalis fighting today in the fields of Ukraine.

Thus, another global map is drawn, one of capitalist distribution of labour, exploited and racialized bodies, as well as networks of infrastructure that propel the movements of migrant workers who are being integrated into its production machinery and trade. This cartographic sketch appears from the composite imagination of those under the management of these flows of labour, those who find themselves caught between endless shifts, chronic unemployment, or an often permanent state of in-between. But this map also excludes individuals and groups, for whom borders of many kinds preclude journeys of many sorts as well as an entire world aspired to by those who have never left their villages but have sustained the flow of global commerce through their hands and dreams. So how does the world appear from a multiplicity of immobile perspectives, from the imagination of those sitting in one place, while weaving and inventing the world (drawing again from a Sufi history, not so much of travelling saints but of interior mystical experiences, from the lineages of East Asian hermits, as well as from other worlds of isolation and introverted erudite world making), a world that might otherwise appear deceivingly entirely legible when viewed through a computer screen? As globalization seems to have been more of a finite epoch than a permanent condition, and geopolitical tensions, anti- immigration politics, and harder borders are threatening different kinds of movements of people, the world will be further imagined and dreamed by those who would travel by staying in place, discerned through different digital layers. Another question in the exhibition leads to cartography, to what relations of power with the world are enacted through picturing it alongside radically different forms of mapping. From the positivist map on a single chequered sheet with shapes of land to be controlled and ways through seascapes to be pursued, all immediately accessible at the finger of an explorer to the celestial navigation charts of waves, stars, bird paths, and complex mathematics, that need to be learnt, memorized, and embodied, so that the knowledge of the world would only reveal itself as one travels on paths that are real or entirely of the imagination. Through all these questions, we might finally arrive at perhaps the most important one of all, which speaks of many quests and struggles, and that is whether we can still hope that the musafiri will one day, somewhere, encounter a world where the power of a host to decide who is a perpetual musafir is shattered and confined to a chronicle of times passed.

Cosmin Costinaș

 

[1] José Lingna Nafafé, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

[2] Quoted in Jason Horn, ‘Primacy of the Pacific Under the Hawaiian Kingdom’, MA thesis, University of Hawaii, 1951, 59.