In The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World, Nienke Boer offers a glimpse into the lives of the unfree of the Indian Ocean—the enslaved, the indentured, and prisoners of war—from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This book is many things: a historical analysis of South Africa's Indian Ocean worlds, a study of the ontology of unfreedom, and a meditation on race and racial identity formation. Above all, though, it is a strident call for an oceanic perspective when approaching questions of historical power, with the Indian Ocean offered as a salient space to do so.

The “brininess” of Boer's title posits that the Indian Ocean is a space uniquely suited to the study of entanglements between Global Norths and Souths, entanglements that render the ocean as a space marked by “subalternaization and solidarity, of violence and care, with a long history of transnational exploitation...

You do not currently have access to this content.