an agent of history.”^77 Similarly, the case of Lemuria demonstrates the power
and vitality of the geography of what is not visible, atoposthat escapes “the
hegemony of the real and the visible.”^78 These works suggest a new way to
write world history. Absences, they propose, are vital to our understanding of
the visible and present world.
Arif Dirlik observes that a “fundamental problem with World History as a
historical genre is an inability to define its boundaries.”^79 The boundaries of
the world are too elusive. Loss presents itself as a useful vehicle for world
historical inquiry in at least two important respects. First is the fact that loss (or,
otherwise put, spatial absence), since it is not real and visible, allows for the
easy transcendence of boundaries. The second utility of the concept rests on
the paradoxical fact of its being the obverse referent for the actual, physical,
visible world. It can be taken as that world’s complementary image.
This leads us to the second spatial problem inherent in world history—not
that of defining spaceswithinthe world, but grasping and defining the space
that is the world itself, an entity that claims in its very name all-encom-
passment, a goal beyond the reach of any history or historian. What, in
thinking of an entire world, is that world’s point of reference? Might it not be
this world’s counterpart, a lost world, its photographic negative? “Lost-world”
histories help us to “perform” world history more fully by offering us the “view
from nowhere,”^80 a look at the world as at once “seen from nowhere” and from
anywhere.^81 They offer a way to see how theoikoumene,the known world,
makes itself present through its laboring over and around that which is known
but absent—here, the ten lost tribes.
In the case of the ten lost tribes, it is a lost ethnos—a category that denotes
both a human group and a geography—that encompasses the geographic and
mythical loss so evocatively described by Ramaswamy and Gillis. Its discovery,
reconstitution, and repatriation are understood as vital—indeed, definitive—
steps on the path to making the world whole, complete. Here, it is not only a
geographictoposthat is at issue—a lost island, or continent. It is also a human
landscape—of races, nations, and human origins. The labors of loss surround-
ing the ten tribes—lost in the past, continuously present, to be found in the
future—present themselves ultimately as speculation about the world itself, its
geography and humanity, its borders, limits, and ends. Indeed, in the centu-
ries-long hunt for the lost tribes, the unit of analysis, always, has been the
world as a whole. The geographical theology involved in the search for the
tribes always has had as its ultimate frame of reference the world. It is always
global in scale. The pattern is classically world historical—while having the
world as a whole as the “ultimate frame of reference,”^82 the seekers of the lost
tribes, like the world historian herself, never really cover the entirety of the
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