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.
More information can be found here.