Hi everyone! We are soliciting paper proposals for a potential panel on slavery and material culture in early modern maritime Asia. While we are currently considering this panel for the AAS, we are also exploring the possibility of submitting to the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meeting in San Francisco in February 2026. Scholars working across disciplines, geographies, and time periods are welcome to reach out with ideas or inquiries.
Empires are built on enslaved labor-the objects they left behind bear traces of that exploitation. Recent decades have seen renewed attention toward the intersection between enslaved peoples and the production of art and material culture, yet this scholarly focus has concentrated overwhelmingly on the transatlantic context. Less attention has been paid to the material histories of maritime Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, where large populations of enslaved peoples from diverse backgrounds sustained the commercial and cultural life of local communities and colonial port cities. In places like Manila, Batavia, Cape Town, Goa, and Colombo, enslaved peoples created distinctive material cultures that reflected both colonial ambitions and the persistence of pre-existing cultural traditions.
This panel seeks to redress this imbalance by exploring the complex relationships between enslaved peoples and material culture in early modern maritime Asia (c. 1500–1800). We invite contributions that move beyond the commercial contexts of slavery to include the lived experiences, everyday practices, and cultural worlds that enslaved peoples created and inhabited. We ask: How might the material archive shed light on overlooked histories of enslaved agency and resistance? How can craft production and making practices offer new perspectives on the complexities of slavery in sites-of-encounter? What can the persistence of indigenous techniques and aesthetics within colonial production reveal about cultural survival and adaptation under bondage?
Interested participants are invited to submit a titled abstract (max 250 words) and a 2-page CV to joyce.zhou@yale.edu and cynthia.kok@aya.yale.edu by July 20, 2025.
We welcome papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to:- Women's labor and gendered objects
- Material culture of resistance and subversion
- Hybrid aesthetics and syncretic craft traditions
- Comparative studies across different sites
- Indigenous and non-western frameworks for material culture studies