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The Briny South
Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World
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Nienke Boer
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2023
About this book
In The Briny South Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to analyze the formation of racialized identities in the imperial world. Drawing on court records, ledgers, pamphlets, censors’ reports, newsletters, folk songs, memoirs, and South African and South Asian works of fiction and autobiography, Boer theorizes the role of sentiment and the depiction of emotions in the construction of identities of displaced peoples across the Indian Ocean. From Dutch East India Company rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to early apartheid South Africa, Boer shows how colonial powers and settler states mediated and manipulated subaltern expressions of emotion as a way to silence racialized subjects and portray them as inarticulately suffering. In this way, sentiment operated in favor of the powerful rather than as an oppositional weapon of the subaltern. By tracing the entwinement of displacement, race, and sentiment, Boer frames the Indian Ocean as a site of subjectification with a long history of transnational connection—and exploitation.
Author / Editor information
Nienke Boer is Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sydney.
Reviews
"One of the work’s great strengths is its ability to articulate how the context and sources for the Indian Ocean differ from those of the Atlantic world, especially for enslavement and indenture. Enslavement in the Indian Ocean world produced a legal archive unlike that of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Boer to ask and answer questions about enslaved life that could not be posed in the Atlantic. This has the dual effect of bringing into relief what is unique about each while simultaneously helping to bring Atlantic world scholars into the world of the Indian Ocean."
-- Jared Asser Emotions: History, Culture, Society
"A keen sense of form enables [Boer] to plot a course through a vast array of legal and literary texts that span centuries and include court rulings, legal complaints, testimonies, and political pamphlets alongside poetry, folk songs, fiction, and memoirs. It is no small feat to weave together an archive as expansive and complex as the Indian Ocean itself, and Boer manages to do so with striking clarity and precision. . . . The Briny South offers a new paradigm for scholars and readers of Indian Ocean literature, histories of enslavement, indenture, internment, inter-imperialism, or South African apartheid."
-- Tyler Scott Ball ISLE
"The Briny South makes an important contribution to the scholarship on law and literature, colonial legalities, law and empire, and legal histories of the Indian Ocean World and those set in the South."
-- Kalyani Ramnath Law & Society Review
"The Briny South is an important addition to the emerging body of scholarship in Indian Ocean literary studies. It offers new theoretical and methodological tools for studying transoceanic linkages between Asia and Africa, an area of research that is been understudied in South Asian studies."
-- Kritish Rajbhandari South Asian Review
"The book combines the historical breadth and environmental focus of ocean studies with the political and ethical drive towards understanding the subaltern experience of globalization that marks Global South studies. . . . The book is full of interesting and binding narratives. Boer has done great work tracing these stories and using an analytical framework to scarping out sentiments from the documents from various chronological periods."
-- Rishabh Verma IIAS Review
-- Rishabh Verma IIAS Review
"This book is many things: a historical analysis of South Africa’s Indian Ocean worlds, a study of the ontology of unfreedom, and a meditation on race and racial identity formation. Above all, though, it is a strident call for an oceanic perspective when approaching questions of historical power, with the Indian Ocean offered as a salient space to do so. . . . For scholars of the region, and those of slavery and indenture, Boer’s book is an exciting and critical intervention."
-- Robert Rouphail Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim
-- Robert Rouphail Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim
“The book is incisive and makes a great contribution to Indian Ocean and Global South studies."
-- Jacky Kosgei African Studies Quarterly
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction: Enslaved, Indentured, Interned
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1. REPRESENTING SPEECH IN BONDAGE IN THE COURT RECORDS OF THE DUTCH CABO DE GOEDE HOOP, 1652–1795
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2. SILENCING THE ENSLAVED The Aesthetics of Abolitionism in the British Cape Colony, 1795–1834
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3. “ GRIEVANCES MORE SENTIMENTAL THAN MATERIAL ” Representing Indentured Labor in Natal, 1860–1915
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4. A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION IN BOER WAR IMPRISONMENT CAMPS IN SOUTH ASIA, 1899–1902
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5.SENTIMENT AND THE LAW IN EARLY SOUTH AFRICAN INDIAN WRITING, 1893–1960
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CODA No Human Footprints
154 -
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Notes
161 -
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Bibliography
187 -
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Index
205
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 15, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9781478024200
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478024200
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
