Exhibit Launch | Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space

Duke History invites you to the grand opening of "Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space" featuring a talk with Indrani Chatterjee, the John L. Nau III Distinguished Professor in the History and Principles of Democracy, at the University of Virginia.

Chatterjee will discuss "Connected but Different: Masters in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean Worlds of the 19th Century."

Abstract: In the book titled "European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850 (2014)," Richard B. Allen established the extent to which Europeans were involved in trading slaves drawn from the societies of the Indian Ocean world. The connection was meant to dissolve the 'tyranny of the Atlantic' : it implied that there was no merit in treating the 'Atlantic slave-system' as distinctive. I argue that such an argument for dissolving the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system must first go through the records of all the Islamicate societies in the Indian Ocean world. I will use the poetic memoir left behind by a Shici master in the princely state of Awadh in the 19th c to point to the differences in the histories of 'racialization' across two oceanic systems in the same period.

A historian of South Asia, Indrani Chatterjee researches the intersections of gender, religion and politics between the late 17th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1999), editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (2006) and co-editor with Richard Eaton of Slavery and South Asian History (2007). With the aid of two grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and a fellowship at the Yale Agrarian Studies Colloquium, she published Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won the Srikanth Dutt award from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi, India). She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes, essays to print and electronic journals.

Refreshments will be served.