| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Sumathi Ramaswamy. The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 334. $60.00.
This book is about the lost continent of Lemuria; in particular, it is about how the discourses that developed around it highlight certain critically important features of modernity. This exercise in what Sumathi Ramaswamy describes as "place-making" also serves to remind us of how the trope of loss can serve as a powerful and enabling tool in the politics of culture and the imagination.	1
The earliest discourses about Lemuria can be traced back to nineteenth-century scientists, particularly those interested in paleogeology and biogeography. These scientists developed the theory that there had once existed a submerged continent in the Indian Ocean that must have acted as some sort of land bridge (and faunal bridge) between India and Madagascar. Over the course of the early twentieth century, however, the idea of Lemuria lost currency among scientists as a consequence of the waning appeal of the theory of lost continents in general. But the notion of Lemuria found a receptive audience among practitioners of the occult and, from the late 1950s, among "New Agers" interested in a countercultural and utopian critique of the present.	. . .

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