Agenda
Conference ‘Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities Across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850’ – keynotes by Professors Sue Peabody and Jennifer L. Gaynor
On 10 and 11 December 2025, the international conference ‘Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities Across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850’ will be held at Leiden University. Organisers are Dries Lyna and Pouwel van Schooten in cooperation with Sanayi Marcelline (all three Posthumus affiliates within the research network Routes and Roots in Colonial and Global History) and Nira Wickramasinghe (Radboud University).
‘Becoming Local?’ pioneers the notion of forgetting to analyze centuries-long processes of self- and community-making in the Indian Ocean world. This two-day 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. It 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.
Keynote lectures will be delivered by Professor Sue Peabody (Washington State University): ”Little’ Stories in ‘Big’ Histories. Families, Mobility, and Identity in the Indian Ocean’ and Professor 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’.
The keynote lectures are open to the general public. Those wanting to attend the whole conference should contact de organisers via e-mail.
This conference forms part of the larger project Forgotten Lineages. Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean World, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
