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.

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

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Enslaved, Indentured, Interned  1
1. Representing Speech in Bondage in the Court Records of the Dutch Cabo de Goede Hoop, 1652–1795  17
2. Silencing the Enslaved: The Aesthetics of Abolitionism in the British Cape Colony, 1795–1834  48
3. “Grievances More Sentimental than Material”: Representing Indentured Labor in Natal, 1860–1915  82
4. A Sentimental Education in Boer War Imprisonment Camps in South Asia, 1899–1902  109
5. Sentiment and the Law in Early South African Indian Writing, 1893–1960  132
Coda. No Human Footprints  154
Notes  161
Bibliography  187
Index  205