International Comparative Literature and Translation Studies seminar

Enslaved voices in the Indian Ocean world

Thursday 7 September, 5:15–6:15pm AEST

In-person: SLC Common Room 536, Level 5, Brennan MacCallum Building A18, The University of Sydney

Online: Join via Zoom

Examining both legal and literary narratives, this talk investigates the representation of the voices—by which I mean the supposed direct speech—of the enslaved in the Indian Ocean world, stretching from Sulawesi to the Malabar Coast to Madagascar and Mozambique to the Cape of Good Hope (today’s Cape Town). The inclusion of affective slave speech in court documents, I argue, forms part of a larger system of legal verisimilitude that works to create plausible narratives through the inclusion of actions, direct speech, and detailed visual descriptions, rather than exposition or summary. Yet, the almost accidental representation of slave voices in the archives also allows for a specifically textual resistance, or friction, that should be understood as adjacent to other forms of slave resistance (arson, escape, and violence against slaveholders) found in these archives. In the final part of the talk, I demonstrate how the form of these legal records has also influenced the representation of the enslaved in 20th and 21st-century fiction from the region.

About the speaker

Dr Nienke Boer is Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sydney. Her first book, The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke UP, 2023) examines narratives of enslavement, indenture, and war imprisonment to argue for the dangers of sentiment as a form of either representation or resistance.

For more information, contact: Dr Sonia Wilson (sonia.wilson@sydney.edu.au)

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