Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00266)

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.

The Lost Land of Lemuria : Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic 
Histories
by Sumathi Ramaswamy 
See:
http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520244400/blavatskystud-20/