The Briny South

The Briny South is a book about how it has felt to be forcibly far from home—or, at least, what it is possible to say or know about the feelings of displacement, particularly when the displaced are also far away in time and from power. It focuses on forced displacement in the context of the Indian Ocean world, exploring what its archives reveal about the experiences of enslavement, indenture, and penal transportation. The term “the briny south” is given by Boer to the intersection between oceanic studies and Global South studies which forms the intellectual backdrop to the book. As she describes, working at that intersection “mobilizes the strengths of these two approaches to map an imagined cartography that combines the historical depth of ocean studies with the political and ethical drive toward understanding the subaltern experience of globalization that marks Global South studies” (5). The book argues that the Indian Ocean can be imagined as a “specifically briny South site,” with its long histories of transnationalism, involving both exploitation and resistance.In The Briny South, Boer starts from the premise that there is no access to the immediate experience of the forcibly displaced, but holds that it is still important to analyze how their feelings are conveyed. She uses the term “sentiment” to refer not to emotions and affect themselves, but to how they are described—whether in legal archives, newsletters, autobiographies, letters, fiction, or other archival records. She shows that sentiment, in contrast, does appear in the archives of the Indian Ocean empire, whether in the reported speech of the enslaved that appears in the court records of the Cape of Good Hope or as self-reported feelings in letters and memoirs written by Boer prisoners-of-war transported to India and Ceylon during the South African War. The Briny South therefore asks not so much whether the subaltern can speak, but what the conditions are in which they can be said to speak, what their sentiments (as reports of feeling rather than feeling itself) reveal or conceal, and to what extent these sentimental signifiers can be mobilized for resistance rather than coercion.In addition to considering displacement through enslavement in the Indian Ocean context, focused on histories of slavery at the Cape Colony (now Cape Town and parts of the Western Cape of South Africa), the book also importantly includes other forms of forced migration, primarily indenture and penal transportation. This allows for an analysis of different kinds and degrees of displacement, as well as a different geography. One of the particularly important points the book makes is about the difference between Atlantic and Indian Ocean archives of enslavement in the eighteenth century. Boer shows that the types of sources available to those studying the forced displacement of slavery in the Indian Ocean world are different from those in the Atlantic for the historically contingent reason that, in the former Dutch, French, and eventually British colonies of the Indian Ocean, both enslaved and free were tried in the same courts, while in the Atlantic they were tried separately, with the slave courts keeping poor if any records. In Boer’s words, “the story of Indian Ocean involuntary displacement is one of recorded legal speech and autobiographical silence, as opposed to the anglophone Atlantic world, which produced autobiographical narratives but legal silence” (6).The first and second chapters of The Briny South explore this story of Indian Ocean slavery. The first chapter examines the legal archives of the Dutch Cabo de Goede Hoop (Cape of Good Hope) between 1652 and 1795. Reported speech, purportedly by the enslaved themselves and often about their feelings—grief, rage, loneliness—appears regularly in the documents. Unlike in abolitionist material, however, the reported speech of the enslaved in this archive is not included to create sympathy, but to generate legal verisimilitude. Despite the distortions which result, Boer shows that the “narratives that emerge from the records are fascinating, providing evidence not only for detailed works of social history, but for creative writers” (21). The second chapter discusses the archives of abolitionism in the subsequent period of the Cape Colony’s history, as British rule takes over from Dutch rule from 1795 to 1834. In this period, the enslaved are largely represented as silent, their sentiments ventriloquized by colonial voices. Boer characterizes this, via the poetry of the Scottish–South African Abolitionist poet Thomas Pringle, as “the Romantic aesthetic of slavery” (2). She contrasts this Romantic and sentimental aesthetic with the blunt, brutal aesthetic of the account books and ledgers which kept accurate reckonings of enslaved bodies and lives. These ledgers and account books, she suggests, may become a basis for future artistic response.The third chapter shifts from the experience of enslavement to that of indenture and from the Cape on the west coast of South Africa to Natal on the east, again turning to first the legal and then the political archives. The legal archives include the complaints filed by indentured workers, primarily from India, against their employers, which are read via Mohandas K. Gandhi’s political writings during the twenty-one years he spent in South Africa. The lingering effects of the Abolitionist and Romantic depictions of forced labor render sentimental language toothless as a tool of resistance, and, in response, indentured workers’ complaints highlight fact over fiction. In his writing, Gandhi frames this distinction as the difference between “material” and “sentimental” grievances, advocating for the former (83). The fourth chapter takes an illuminating turn to the ways in which forced displacement operates in a different racial context. It addresses the memoirs and letters of Boer prisoners of war sent as penal transportees by the British to internment camps in South Asia, particularly Ceylon. It shows that the early prisoner-of-war memoirs portrayed Afrikaner prisoners as “imperial wanderers and travelers, rather than patiently suffering Afrikaners” (129), a record largely suppressed in favor of the “tight nationalism” that emerges later with the advent of Apartheid. In the early letters, British censors’ removal of all references to positive and negative sentiment suggests a link between sentiment and resistance. However, later memoirs reveal a shift to sentiment’s use as a claim primarily to the kind of belonging that denies the belonging of racial others. In Boer’s view, the case study shows that, while paradoxical, “sentiment functions much more effectively when wielded by those in power” (131).The fifth chapter, “Sentiment and the Law in Early South African Indian Writing, 1893–1960,” brings the arguments of the previous two chapters into the twentieth century and into the field of literary representation. In, for instance, the first South African Indian novel, Behold the Earth Mourns by Ansuyah R. Singh (1960), the author mobilizes both sentimental and legal language, the text surfacing the “problem of [their] mutually contaminating rhetoric” (141). In particular, attempts in this and other texts to lay claims to the land using the same sentimental language as that which is used by Afrikaner writers repeatedly come up against the legal context which associates Indian people with the indenture contract, and therefore with temporariness rather than belonging. The final short “Coda” to the book brings its wide-ranging arguments about the legacy of empire in the Indian Ocean world into the present by demonstrating how displacement and sentiment operate in similar ways in the more recent legal battle about belonging in the Chagos Archipelago.The Briny South is thus set on a very wide geographic and historical stage, reaching from South Africa to South Asia, and from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. If at times there seem to be too many key concepts in play, for the most part the book charts a narrow and illuminating course through these vast waters, as well as across at least two disciplines (history and literature) and multiple languages (primarily English, Dutch, and Afrikaans, with some reference to others like Bhojpuri). However, it should be noted that while the title of the book and part of its framing center on “the briny south,” there is not much brine, or ocean, in the book’s chapters. As Boer herself notes, “these are not all stories about the ocean,” but poses that they are nonetheless “oceanic stories” (5). While that may be true, it is not always clear to what extent the environmental associations of “oceanic” or “briny” contribute to framing the arguments about displacement and sentiment, which are nuanced and convincing as they stand.Throughout, The Briny South offers attentiveness to what the archives of displacement actually present, along with close reading of their forms and genres. In its discussion of whether sentiment might be used as an effective form of protest or resistance, and demonstration of the ways in which it is mostly co-opted by the powerful, it provides an oblique history of contemporary expressions of trauma and feeling as forms of protest. The Briny South, as a work of careful, South-centered, and deep historicization, is therefore instructive not only about the pasts of oppression and resistance, but their present and future too

Displacement (psychology · Geography · Indian ocean · Psychoanalysis · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Oceanography · Psychology