CFP Virtual International Conference on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700), April 2-3, 2025
This interdisciplinary conference on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive
Cultures (1400-1700) seeks to explore new perspectives on the impact of slavery, religions,
migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean on Afro-Asian communities and their
expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700). It aims to uncover the untold
musical histories of migration and migratory histories of music around the Indian Ocean world
and beyond, how these mobilities can be identified in various cultural manifestations, and how
expressive cultures and ritual articulated identity, self-fashioning, community and resistance to
human rights’ violations.
While scholars have written extensively on the histories of slavery, trade, religions, migration
and the circulation of material culture around the Indian Ocean since ancient times, the
multifaceted nature of early modern Afro-Asian entanglements and encounters that
constituted these Indian Ocean worlds has posed an array of challenges for studies endeavoring
to capture their multivalent intersections with cultural practices, especially intangible heritage,
and local knowledge systems.
The conference is deliberately articulated under the provocative title of the ‘Black Indian
Ocean’ to serve as a counter dialogue to scholarly diaspora studies on the early modern Black
Atlantic and the massive impact of the Black Atlantic slave trade, religious and trade networks
on cultural mobilities and their enduring impact in the Americas, which has received
considerable attention, and instead to focus on parallel themes in the Indian Ocean slave trade
which predated the Atlantic and Islamic slave trades by centuries, was on a scale of equal
magnitude, and yet in-depth scholarly examination on early modern arts remains limited.
The conference takes its starting point from the true story of Gabriel, a 16th-century Ethiopian
Jew who was enslaved in Asia and converted to Islam, to address wider themes around religion,
ritual, slavery, race, agency, and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world; musical and
other artistic representations of race, lament, violence, grief, slavery and IOW cultures; and the
research and processes behind recreating past slave narratives, such as Gabriel's Odyssey,
developed by the Kukutana Ensemble.
Gabriel’s Odyssey is a musical narrative that tells the incredible 16th-century story of Gabriel, a
Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was abducted as a young child and sold into slavery in the Arab
world, and his woeful wanderings between faiths, love and persecution in Asia to his final
encounters with the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Drawing on imaginary and sumptuous
soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world, Gabriel’s life
represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the
experiences of countless other early modern Africans.
Scholars from African Studies and South Asian Studies, including early modern cultural
historians, historians, (ethno)musicologists, anthropologists, art historians, race scholars, and
practitioners are invited to submit papers that engage renewed analytical attention to the
intersections between slavery, religions, migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean
on Afro-Asian communities and their expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700)
through established or emerging scholarship, without disciplinary limitations, that address (but
are not limited to) the following themes:
-the impact of religion, ritual, slavery, and migration on Afro-Asian communities in the early
modern Indian Ocean world and their expressive cultures
-dynamics of enslavement, faith, and power in the IOW and how communi[es/individuals drew
on their faiths and cultural expressions to survive/resist
- musical and artistic representations/reenactments of slavery, race, lament, violence, grief in
IOW cultures.
-new perspec[ves on archives/research methodologies and the characteriza[on/telling of the
long history of Africans in the Indian subcon[nent
-theories of ontology, religion and violence
-intercultural encounters in religion in the Afro-Asian soundscape
- the Indian Ocean as an early modern African diasporic site and notions of oceanic
“cosmopolitanism”
-Habshi life around the IOW basin and links to slave trading in the Horn of Africa and the Arab
world
-how early modern social categories such as gender, religion, caste, ethnicity and origin
intersected with relations of slavery and servitude
-religious persecution in 16th-century Portuguese India
-impact of gender: women in early modern IOW slavery and their cultural manifestations
-ques[ons of narra[ve, representa[on and posi[onality in re-telling and/or reconstruc[ng slave
histories or past narra[ves, especially those involving race, violence, lament or grief.
-the circula[on of early modern musical cultures and objects as linked to African and/or Asian
cases of displacement or mobility
-documen[ng and conceptualizing music and materials that moved or were moved across the
Indian ocean
***
The 2-day international conference on The Black Indian Ocean will be held online on April 2-3,
2025. This will be followed by an in-person live performance by the Afro-Asian Kukutana
Ensemble of Gabriel’s Odyssey at Yale MacMillan Center on April 4, 2025, free and open to the
public. We strongly encourage all delegates in the greater New Haven region, who are able to
travel to Yale, to attend the US première of Gabriel’s Odyssey.
A selection of conference papers will be published in an edited volume (press to be confirmed),
together with the 16th-century slave narrative and musical and visual artworks of Gabriel’s
Odyssey by the Kukutana Ensemble.
A short documentary film by Music Beyond Borders about Gabriel’s Afro-Asian slave story in the
wider context of the Black Indian Ocean world of slavery, religion, violence, race, identity,
persecution and agency, and the making of Gabriel’s Odyssey, is under development (subject to
funding).
Deadline for abstracts: December 15, 2024
Please submit proposals for 20 mins papers in WORD document, with a paper title, abstract
max. 300 words, author name, contact email, phone number, institutional affiliation, and any
A/V requirements, to Dr. Janie Cole: janie.cole@uconn.edu, with subject line “The Black Indian
Ocean Proposal”. Selected participants will be contacted shortly thereafter.
This event has been generously sponsored by:
Yale MacMillan Center’s Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
Yale Council on African Studies
Yale Institute of Sacred Music
Yale Council on Middle East Studies
Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Music Beyond Borders
Yale Religion and Society in Africa
Yale School of Music