Conference

Conference: Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities Across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850

Date

Wednesday 10 December 2025 - Thursday 11 December 2025

Address

Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

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.

For more information and attendance please contact [e-mail]

Program

Wednesday December 10^th 2025 (Law Room Academiegebouw)

9u30-10u: Registration and tea/coffee @ Faculty Club Academiegebouw                                                                         

10u-10u20: Welcome by Nira Wickramasinghe                             

10u20-12u20: Session 1 (chair Dries Lyna, discussant Alicia Schrikker)

Nicholas C. Sy (Radboud University Nijmegen)

          ‘Harmad and Kapre: African and South Asian Engagement with Colonial Enslavement, 1583-1699’

Titas Chakraborty (Duke Kunshan University)

          ‘On the Margins of Indigeneity: Indian Ocean World Slavery and the Making of Portuguese Community in 18^th-century Bengal’

Eva Marie Lehner (Bonn University)

          ‘Creolising Belongings: Diasporic Communities and Enslavement in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Colonial Cape’

12u20-13u50: Lunch @ Herta Mohr building

13u50-15u10: Session 2 (chair Pouwel van Schooten, discussant Sue Peabody)

Iqbal Rizaldin and Muhammad Asyrafi (Leiden University)

            ‘From Outsiders to Insiders(?): Enslaved Balinese in Early Modern Batavia’

Dries Lyna (Radboud University Nijmegen)

           ‘Better a Neighbour Nigh, than a Brother Afar? Lankan Free Blacks in the 18^th-Century Cape Colony’

15u10-15u30: Tea/coffee break  @ Faculty Club Academiegebouw

15u30-16u50: Session 3 (chair Dries Lyna, discussant Jennifer Gaynor)

Pouwel van Schooten (Leiden University)

           ‘A Suitable Girl? Marriage and the Descendants of Manumitted People in 18^th-Century Galle, Sri Lanka’

Loraine Chappuis (University of Lausanne)

          ‘Fictive Kinship and Relatedness in Wills of Free People of Colour (Mauritius, 18^th-19^th Century)’

17u15-18u15: Keynote (chair Nira Wickramasinghe, intro Sanayi Marcelline) @Lipsius Building 2.27

Sue Peabody (Washington State University)

          ‘‘Little’ Stories in ‘Big’ Histories. Families, Mobility, and Identity in the Indian Ocean’

Conference dinner

 

Thursday December 11th 2025 (Law Room Academiegebouw)

9u30-10u: Registration and tea/coffee @ Faculty Club Academiegebouw              

10u-12u: Session 4 (chair Dries Lyna, discussant Luc Bulten)

Alexander van der Meer (Leiden University)

            ‘From Displacement to Localization: The Dual Identity of Kampung Tugu Under Dutch Colonial Rule’

Sethuparvathy S and Smita Jha (Indian Institute of Technology)

            ‘The Ghosts of Kochi: African Slavery, Colonialism, and the Legend of Kappiri Muthappan’

Sanayi Marcelline (Leiden University)

            ‘Defining Community in an Inter-Imperial Space: Community Construction in Early 19^th-Century Colombo’

12u-13u30: Lunch @ Herta Mohr building

13u30-14u40: Session 5 (chair Sanayi Marcelline, discussant Sanjukta Poddar)

Julia Jong Haines (Syracuse University)

            ‘The Materiality of Belonging: Archaeological Perspectives on Mauritian Indentured Laborers’

Mageswari Rajah (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

            ‘Indian Convict Families: Becoming Local in the Straits Settlements’

14u40-15u: Tea/coffee break @ Faculty Club Academiegebouw       

15u-16u20: Session 6 (chair Dries Lyna, discussant Nira Wickramasinghe)

Hideaki Suzuki (National Museum of Ethnology Osaka)

           ‘Relocation and Becoming Local: A Case Study of Liberated Africans in Freretown’

Felicitas Becker and Igor Matonda (Ghent University)

           ‘The Nyamwezi in the Congo between Marginalization and Recognition’

16u20-16u40: Closing remarks by Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University)

17u-18u: Keynote (chair Nira Wickramasinghe, intro Pouwel van Schooten) @ Lipsius Building 1.47

Jennifer L. Gaynor (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)

           ‘Remembering and Forgetting in Two Worlds. Writing Histories of Forced Displacement and Submerged Genealogy’

 

For more information please contact [e-mail]