ABSTRACTS IN ORDER OF INTERVENTION Panel 1: Amitav Ghosh – Thursday 11.30 – 13.00 Auditori Routes Beyond Roots: Alternative Ecological Histories in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies Maria-Sabina Draga, University of Bucharest This paper will attempt to read Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies as an account of “world histories from below” (to use Antoinette Burton's term, 2012) and take the debate further through positioning the idea of writing alternative histories of the colonial times within an ecocritical context. While the need for such rewritings has always been a central preoccupation of postcolonial literature, the recent tendency (shared by Ghosh) has been to look at history from increasingly local, individualised perspectives. I will examine Ghosh's tracing of routes and connectivities across the Indian Ocean at the time immediately preceding the opium wars, focusing on the consequent reconsideration of human relationships and hierarchies in a post-human perspective. This perspective cuts across boundaries established by caste, social class, biology and geography, as well as by the colonial system, which Ghosh has long been interested in reimagining. While on board the Ibis identities become deterritorialised and fluid, they are disconnected from their various roots and paths established by rigid culturally conditioned frameworks. Connections are established between the human and other forms of life, forming a continuum across the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, which becomes a fluid space of rebuilding identities. I will position my discussion within a theoretical framework informed by Bruno Latour's concept of a politics of nature, Donna Haraway's nature-culture negotiations and Sangeeta Ray's studies of ecological intimacies. Facets of Freedom in the Indian Ocean World: The Case of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies Sneharika Roy, American University of Paris This paper explores the configuration of freedom specific to the Indian Ocean in Sea of Poppies from three perspectives: social (i.e., freedom from social determinisms of caste and karmic rebirth); judicial (i.e., the untrammelled mobility offered by the Freedom of the Seas); and economic (i.e., the credo of Free Trade attributed to Adam Smith). It will demonstrate that on the surface, each approach highlights trajectories of liberation—from caste, from territorial jurisdiction, and from national economic protectionism. However, on further analysis, each proves to be double-edged. Moreover, these approaches intersect in sometimes disturbing ways: it is precisely the discourse of Free Trade that has created the conditions for the emergence of transnational labour forces that characterises early capitalism. From this tension between emancipation and oppression is born a dialectics of ambivalence—of being “free” to choose indentured labour over other forms of servitude, but also of being enslaved anew to discourses of human and capital mobility. The distinction between “slave and free,” therefore, is not only “not always clear” (Hofmeyr 2007), but also insidiously and indissolubly intertwined. The Indian Ocean in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy: British Colonisation, Diaspora and Migration, Gendered and Transnational Identities Arunima Dey, Universidad de Salamanca The paper discusses the first two novels of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy which consists of Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and soon to be released Flood of Fire (2015). The novels for majority of the storyline is set on a ship called Ibis sailing across the Indian Ocean. Ghosh presents us with a motley set of characters aboard the ship. The novels allow us to explore the question of gendered roles through sati rituals and domestic violence, and transnational identities by introducing characters from different countries who have been subjected to varied styles of upbringing and cultures. Ghosh also brings forth the topic of British colonisation and its cultural and economic impact on the Indian Subcontinent. Though the novels are essentially about opium trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, through the medium of land and sea and ship’s voyage across Indian Ocean, Ghosh highlights the complexity of cultural and national diaspora bought about by colonisation, migration and trade which leads to a unique retelling of history. Finally, this paper is an attempt to demonstrate how the author uses the Indian Ocean as a way to bring together various significant issues ranging from cultural identities to colonisation. Panel 2: South African Indians (1) – Thursday 11.30 – 13.00 - Sala de Juntes Changing identities and mechanisms for survival: The Indian Community and Apartheid “Beyond the Kala Pani : the Indian Ocean and “coolitude” in recent Indian, South African and Caribbean Fiction” Modhumita Roy, Tufts University 16 November 2012 marked the 150 th anniversary of the arrival of SS Truro carrying the first group of indentured Indian labourers to Durban, South Africa. In Trinidad, the 150 th anniversary of “arrival day” was celebrated on 30 May 1995. These celebrations of arrivals have also been the occasion for taking stock of the history of dispersal of “girmityas” (a word derived from the agreements the indentured labourers had to sign), and their traumatic journeys across oceans to new and unknown worlds. Recent works such as Amitava Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies , Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin , Neelam Govender’s Girrmit Tales have begun the work of recuperating the cultural memory of crossing. Focussing on these texts and building on the critical work of Ashwin Desai, Isobel Hofmeyr, Lindy Stiebel, among others, this paper is a preliminary mapping of literary representation of the voyages across the “kala pani.” The aim of the paper is to chart the different moments of “arrival”—at Durban and Port of Spain-- as linked experience of “coolitude”—that is, “the project of reclamation and re-imagining of the coolie odyssey worldwide.” (Stiebel) Changing Identities and the South African Indian Community Neville Choonoo, SUNY-Oneonta Indian South Africans have often adopted and created various cultural norms (dialect) of survival, in order to endure the horrors of racism. While segregated, Indians were able as ‘non-whites’ to form political alliances (Natal Indian Congress, BC Movement) with the larger majority of Black resistance fighters within the ANC and PAC. In that regard, Indian South Africans adapted themselves very readily to an international Asian diaspora, one that embraced BOTH East Indian elements as well as European and especially American political philosophies. This paper considers the formation of a South African Indian identity as it reflects influences from a larger Black international community and not just an East Indian one. Much of my work has examined the Transatlantic Connection between Black South Africans and Black America as it reflected in the autobiography. In my paper for this conference, I would like to examine the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa (1970-1985) and the extent to which Indian South Africans resisted efforts by the Apartheid Govt to ‘retribalize’ the SA Indian community. Thus, East Indian culture was often held suspect by younger activist like myself. South African ‘sugar stories’, with some reference to Mauritius Lindy Stiebel, University of KwaZulu-Natal This paper will focus on the theme of what can be called plantation literature in South African and Mauritian literature; that is, writing which has as its spatial focus sugar farms or plantations. The term ‘plantation’ is more commonly used in the Atlantic world but, in common with the sugar plantations in South Africa linked to the Indian Ocean, the communities of such farms in the nineteenth century were characterised by the existence of two sets of people: a wealthy elite of plantation owners and a large, poor population of plantation workers. The descendants of such labourers – in both South Africa and Mauritius comprising Indian indentured workers from the subcontinent – have survived to tell the tales of their forefathers and, by extension, their own. The literature that has emerged from this theme, ‘plantation literature’, engages with issues of memory, identity and suffering. The 150 th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured Indian labourers in South Africa in 2010, saw a spike in the number of works written by South African Indian writers with the ‘sugar stories’ prominent among them. Was there also a spike in the number of ‘sugar texts’ in Mauritius which had an earlier start to indenture with labourers from the subcontinent arriving in the 1830s? This paper seeks to explore this question while focusing primarily on South African ‘sugar texts’ as a start. Panel 3: South African Futures – Thursday, 14.30 – 16 - Auditori Imagining the Other - the Representation of the African Migrant in Contemporary South African Literature Sandra Saayman, Université de La Réunion Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has experienced increased migration from African countries. The fact that migrants are subject to xenophobic violence comes as a surprise in the light of the country’s Rainbow Nation image, and its Pan-African ideals embodied in the ANC’s rallying cry of the struggle years, Mayibuye iAfrika (“Africa return”). These incidents reached notorious peaks in 2008 and April 2015. The complex and sensitive topic of migration manifests itself in interesting ways in contemporary South African literature. The aim of this paper is to determine whether literature depicts the migrant as a three- dimensional character rather than a problem or a statistic. Is contemporary South African fiction able to allow the reader to imagine the migrant as someone with an identity rooted in a specific culture, someone with complex reasons for being in South Africa? After a brief introduction of the myths surrounding the African migrants, the way in which contemporary authors – ranging from Breyten Breytenbach to Angelina Sithebe – approach these questions in their novels published since 2004, will be explored. This paper will also briefly refer to the film District 9 , which is set in Johannesburg and portrays the “illegal alien” as an extra-terrestrial.