Friday, January 8, 2010: 10:10 AM
Edward B (Hyatt)
Clare Anderson
“Travelling Natives’: ‘convicts’ and ‘coolies’ in the Indian Ocean, c. 1800-1890"
This paper will focus on the experiences of transported convicts and indentured labourers who sailed across the Indian Ocean during the period c. 1800-1890. I will argue that journeys across the ocean constituted the physical and imaginative transformation of Indians from socially and culturally static communities to social, cultural, and geographical travellers. This transformation was effected through an interesting interplay between mobility and confinement as mutually exclusive experiences and processes. I will show that convict and indentured ships were encounter zones; spaces where bodies, languages, cultures, and peoples converged. As such they could and did replicate land-based social and economic hierarchies, though they did not necessarily do so.
“Travelling Natives’: ‘convicts’ and ‘coolies’ in the Indian Ocean, c. 1800-1890"
This paper will focus on the experiences of transported convicts and indentured labourers who sailed across the Indian Ocean during the period c. 1800-1890. I will argue that journeys across the ocean constituted the physical and imaginative transformation of Indians from socially and culturally static communities to social, cultural, and geographical travellers. This transformation was effected through an interesting interplay between mobility and confinement as mutually exclusive experiences and processes. I will show that convict and indentured ships were encounter zones; spaces where bodies, languages, cultures, and peoples converged. As such they could and did replicate land-based social and economic hierarchies, though they did not necessarily do so.
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