Call for Papers: Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities Across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850
Keynote speakers: Jennifer Gaynor (University at Buffalo SUNY) and Sue Peabody (Washington State University)
10-11 December 2025
Leiden, The Netherlands
Becoming Local? pioneers the notion of forgetting to analyze centuries-long processes of self- and community-making in the Indian Ocean world. Throughout history, but especially since the arrival of the Europeans, people were forcefully displaced from their homes in Asia and Africa under systems of slavery, forced labour and banishment; across the Indian Ocean they encountered settled groups who tended to define themselves in contrast to these ‘others’. This conference traces the paths through which generations of displaced individuals and their descendants under colonial regimes gradually or abruptly changed their relationship to their home country, (un)willingly erased or even forgot their past, and became local subjects.
This two-day conference seeks to move away from a conceptual approach that unproblematically projects colonial social categories of the more recent past – Cape Coloured, Malay, Burgher, Kaffir, Moor, Orang Borgo or Mardijkers – back in time, and opts for studying the everyday making of forms of belonging over two centuries. With an explicit intergenerational approach the conference aims to track down the revolving doors of individual/family/community forgetting, writing contiguous microhistories to reinvent the historiography of empires and global connections. Becoming Local thus advocates the urgency of uncovering the genealogy of racialized social categories, what purposes they served at given times, and how displaced descent permeated the making and shaping of racialized groups.
Central questions in this conference are:
- How did displaced individuals experience otherness in their new homes? What role did religion, gender or kinship play in constructing these experiences?
- What routes or options did colonial societies offer these displaced individuals and families to (not) distance themselves from their past? To what extent did marriage, religious conversion and/or professional choices offer opportunities to become ‘local’?
- To what extent did experiences of otherness differ between the paper realities of the various European colonizers and the social/lived realities of communities?
- How can we integrate colonial records with indigenous (narrative) sources to write contiguous histories of displaced communities that traverse multiple archives?
- How did the spatial nature of the colonial port (and its surroundings) and displaced communities interact? Where and why did they live in certain spaces?
- To what extent were the experiences of displaced communities either silenced, rewritten or emphasized in later colonial and postcolonial histories? Were they forgotten or do these histories live on beyond conventional (written) historiography?
We therefore invite researchers to consider various forms of ‘becoming local’ in relation to colonial/imperial regimes within the 18th- and 19th- century Indian Ocean World. We welcome proposals from both junior and senior scholars, and comparative studies as well as interdisciplinary approaches are certainly encouraged. Abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 200 words) should be sent to forgottenlineages@hum.leidenuniv.nl before 31 March 2025. Decisions on acceptance of presentations will be communicated no later than 30 April 2025. For more information, contact one of the conference’s organizers.
Unfortunately there is no funding available for this conference, thus participants will have to fund their own travel to and from Leiden.
Organized by: Nira Wickramasinghe, Sanayi Marcelline, Pouwel van Schooten (Leiden University) and Dries Lyna (Radboud University Nijmegen)