"The Briny South examines the legal, autobiographical, and fictional accounts by and about three groups of involuntary or coerced Indian Ocean migrants: enslaved persons transported to the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company from their Indian Ocean outposts in South and Southeast Asia and East Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; South Asian indentured laborers sent to the British colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911; and South African war prisoners shipped to camps in British India and Ceylon during the second South African War (1899-1902). Examining court records, ledgers, pamphlets, censors' reports, newsletters, folk songs, as well as South African and South Asian works of fiction and autobiography such as Mohandas K. Gandhi's Autobiography, Ansuyah R. Singh's novel, Behold the Earth Mourns, Thomas Pringle's poetry, and memoirs by Boer war prisoners, Nienke Boer focuses on sentiment, or the depiction of emotion, as a locus to understand how racialized identities are constructed through displacement in the imperial world"--
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 connectionand exploitation.
Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to show how colonial powers mediation of sentiment and emotion was central to the racialization of these marginalized peoples.
