Overview

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.

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9781478016915

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"""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 *"

"""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 *"

"""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 *"

Author Information

Nienke Boer is Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sydney.

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