English seminar: The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World
3 May | Woolley S226 Room and Zoom
Nienke Boer, ‘The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World’
This talk provides a brief introduction to and survey of my book, The Briny South, which examines the legal, autobiographical, and fictional narratives produced in the wake of three forms of imperial involuntary or coerced migration between South Asia and South Africa: enslavement, indenture, and war imprisonment. From the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to early apartheid South Africa, I show how colonial powers and settler states mediated and manipulated subaltern expressions of emotion as a way to silence racialized subjects. In this way, sentiment operated in favour of the powerful rather than as an oppositional weapon of the subaltern. By tracing the entwinement of displacement, race, and sentiment, I frame the Indian Ocean as a site of subjectification with a long history of transnational connection—and exploitation.
Nienke Boer is Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from New York University, in Comparative Literature. She works in the fields of Global South studies, Ocean studies, Law and Literature, and African and South Asian literatures, and her research focuses on the lives and narratives of groups of people involuntarily displaced by the forces of Empire. Her book, The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World, was published by Duke University Press in February 2023, and her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, MLN, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Comparative Literature Studies.
Contact: Liam Semler (liam.semler@sydney.edu.au)
Seminar overview for S1 2023
| 22 March
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Gretchen Minton (Montana State University, and Fulbright Scholar, James Cook University), ‘Big Skies and Specific Sites: Shakespeare’s Environments in the North American West’
|
| 5 April
Zoom only |
Harilaos Stecopolous (University of Iowa), ‘Reconsidering Transnational Literary Studies: US Literature in the Diplomatic Frame’
|
| 19 April
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Doug Battersby (Marie Curie Global Fellow, Stanford and Bristol), ‘Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel’
|
| 3 May
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Nienke Boer (University of Sydney), ‘The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World’
|
| 17 May
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Frances Di Lauro (University of Sydney). Title to be advised. |
