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
Location: 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 forgottenlineages@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Programme: Day 1

Venue:	Faculty Club, Academiegebouw
9:30-10:00	Registration and coffee/tea
Venue:	Law Room, Academiegebouw
10:00-10:20	Welcome by prof.dr. Nira Wickramasinghe
10:20-12:20	Session 1: ‘Harmad and Kapre: African and South Asian Engagement with Colonial Enslavement, 1583-1699’ (Nicholas C. Sy, Radboud University Nijmegen) ‘On the Margins of Indigeneity: Indian Ocean World Slavery and the Making of Portuguese Community in 18th-century Bengal’ (Titas Chakraborty, Duke Kunshan University) ‘Creolising Belongings: Diasporic Communities and Enslavement in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Colonial Cape’ (Eva Marie Lehner, Bonn University)
Venue:	Herta Mohr, LIAS Common Room
12:20-13:50	Lunch
13:50-15:10	Session 2: ‘From Outsiders to Insiders(?): Enslaved Balinese in Early Modern Batavia’ (Iqbal Rizaldin and Muhammad Asyrafi, Leiden University) ‘Better a Neighbour Nigh, than a Brother Afar? Lankan Free Blacks in the 18th-Century Cape Colony’ (Dries Lyna, Radboud University Nijmegen)
15:10-15:30	Coffee/tea break
15:30-16:50	Session 3: ‘A Suitable Girl? Marriage and the Descendants of Manumitted People in 18th-Century Galle, Sri Lanka’ (Pouwel van Schooten, Leiden University) ‘Fictive Kinship and Relatedness in Wills of Free People of Colour (Mauritius, 18th-19th Century)’ (Loraine Chappuis, University of Lausanne)
Venue:	Lipsius 2.27
17:15-18:15	KEYNOTE: Sue Peabody (Washington State University) ‘‘Little’ Stories in ‘Big’ Histories. Families, Mobility, and Identity in the Indian Ocean’

Programme: Day 2

Venue:	Faculty Club, Academiegebouw
9:30-10:00	Registration and coffee/tea
Venue:	Law Room, Academiegebouw
10:00-12:00	Session 4: ‘From Displacement to Localization: The Dual Identity of Kampung Tugu Under Dutch Colonial Rule’ (Alexander van der Meer, Leiden University) ‘The Ghosts of Kochi: African Slavery, Colonialism, and the Legend of Kappiri Muthappan’ (Sethuparvathy S and Smita Jha, Indian Institute of Technology) ‘Defining Community in an Inter-Imperial Space: Community Construction in Early 19th-Century Colombo’ (Sanayi Marcelline, Leiden University)
Venue:	Herta Mohr, LIAS Common Room
12:00-13:30	Lunch
13:30-14:40	Session 5 ‘The Materiality of Belonging: Archaeological Perspectives on Mauritian Indentured Laborers’ (Julia Jong Haines, Syracuse University) ‘Indian Convict Families: Becoming Local in the Straits Settlement’ (Mageswari Rajah, Nanyang Technological University Singapore)
14:40-15:00	Coffee/tea break
15:00-16:20	Session 6 ‘Relocation and Becoming Local: A Case Study of Liberated Africans in Freretown’ (Hideaki Suzuki, National Museum of Ethnology Osaka) ‘The Nyamwezi in the Congo between Marginalization and Recognition’ (Felicitas Becker and Igor Matonda, Ghent University)
16:20-16:40	Closing remarks by prof.dr. Nira Wickramasinghe
Venue:	Lipsius 1.47
17:00-18:00	KEYNOTE: 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’