April 2-3, 2025
Organized by: Dr. Janie Cole (University of Connecticut) in collaboration with Yale MacMillan Center, Yale Council on African Studies, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music
The interdisciplinary conference explores 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 artistic and material cultures of Afro-Asian communities in the Indian Ocean world and its diasporas, 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 wider conference themes are 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. Instead, the intention is to explore parallel themes outside Atlantic paradigms that provide more nuanced interpretations open to the impact of gender, different states of slavery, and environmental factors in Indian Ocean slavery, which predated the Atlantic and Islamic slave trades by centuries, was on a scale of equal magnitude, and yet in-depth scholarly examination into its enduring impact on early modern expressive cultures remains at best limited.
The conference takes its starting point from the true story of Gabriel, a 16th-century Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was enslaved in Asia and converted first to Islam then to Christianity, 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 faith, race, lament, violence, grief, slavery and IOW cultures; and the research and artistic processes behind recreating past slave narratives, such as Gabriel's Odyssey, developed by the Kukutana Ensemble (founded by Janie Cole).
The event will culminate in a live performance by the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble of the 16th-century African slave narrative, Gabriel’s Odyssey, at Yale Luce Hall on April 4, 2025, at 7.30pm.
Gabriel’s Odyssey is a vibrant musical and visual narrative that tells the incredible true 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, as based on historical reconstructions by Matteo Salvadore. Gabriel’s story challenges ways of thinking about the past and creates a long-lost sonic landscape that allows dialogue and interplay between distinct Afro-Eurasian sacred and secular musical and visual traditions. 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.
