Newly published in the Sydney Review of Books:
This conversation between Elleke Boehmer and Meg Samuelson began in a book-talk seminar hosted by the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town on 15 September 2015 and continued across subsequent months of travel and exchange between three countries, Britain, South Africa and Australia. The conversation tacks between two award-winning books by Boehmer, the cultural history Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford UP, 2015) and the novel The Shouting in the Dark (Jacana; Sandstone, 2015). Together Boehmer and Samuelson draw out the unexpected resonances discovered in a study of Indian arrivals in London from the opening of the Suez Canal to the first world war, and a novel set in South Africa after the second world war, and consider how writing and shipboard yarns weave these worlds together.