Nienke Boer, "The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World" (Duke UP, 2023)

In The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke University Press, 2023), 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 to 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.

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

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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