Asian Seafarers in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century English Literature: The Forgotten Black Slaves of the Transatlantic

FAIN: FT-278425-21

Humberto Garcia
University of California, Merced (Merced, CA 95344-0039)

Research and writing leading to a book on Asian seafarers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature.

During the height of the African slave trade, British officials initiated the lesser-known forced migration of lascars or Asian sailors, known as “black slaves.” They manned Atlantic-bound ships under conditions that resembled those of enslaved Africans. My book project addresses this gap in critical histories of racial enslavement by examining literary representations of lascars, a workforce that fueled east-west commercial shipping from the late seventeenth century to the end of World War II. Stranded in Britain, they appeared as specters to English writers who imagined a social solution for them different from the one they had devised for black Africans—a moral sympathy wedded to a policy of detention and deportation rather than abolition. My proposed monograph not only bridges hemispheric divisions in humanities scholarship but also creates a new field for studying Indo-Atlantic conceptions of slavery, skin color, migrant labor, and citizenship in English literature and culture.