Book Talk: Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire
In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns. They show how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, revealing the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with liberal contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a "cotton queen" and courtesans, and fugitive "slaves" and concubines populates the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of "slavery in the East" in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of US slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.
Awam Amkpa is a cultural theorist, theatre scholar and practitioner-director, playwright and actor, filmmaker, and curator of visual and performing arts. He is a professor of Drama and Cultural Theory at the departments of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, and Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He is currently serving as Dean of Arts and Humanities as well as Vice Provost for the Arts at New York University-Abu Dhabi. Amkpa is the author of the book Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, as well as numerous art catalogues and articles in books and journals on modernisms in theatre, postcolonial theatre, Black Atlantic studies, and film studies and co-authored several articles on cultural practices, history and politics. He has directed film documentaries including Winds Against Our Souls, It’s All About Downtown, National Images and Transnational Desires, feature film Wazobia and has recently directed and produced a feature film based on the prison memoir of Nobel laureate in literature and his mentor - Wole Soyinka.
Gunja SenGupta is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her current research and teaching interests lie in 19th-century US history within global contexts of slavery and colonialism. She is the author of the books For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (1996); From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (2009), and with Awam Amkpa, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (2023), as well as numerous scholarly journals like the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (now African American) History, Civil War History, Kansas History, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Transition Magazine. Her work has been funded by fellowships and grants awarded by Mrs Giles Whiting, Wolfe, Tow, Mellon, foundations among others, as well most recently by CUNY’s Mellon-funded Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI-CUNY).
Date: January 9, 2024
Time: 5:30 PM IST
Venue: Ahmedabad University Bookstore, University Centre, Central Campus
