Henry Trotter
I joined the Yale history program after completing a BA (English) at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 1999 and an MA (African Studies) at Yale in 2002. My interest in African history developed as a result of spending 6 years on the continent during my twenties, when I traveled to 17 countries in eastern & southern Africa (including the Indian Ocean islands). My research has thus far been divided between two major projects: post-apartheid memory and modern port culture. I started looking into post-apartheid memory in 1999 during my MA, when I spent a year in Cape Town researching the impact of apartheid-era forced removals on the Cape coloured population. I interviewed over 100 victims of Group Areas evictions. My research resulted in a thesis called "Removals and Remembrance: Commemorating Community in Coloured Cape Town."
My dissertation on modern port culture starts with the recognition that, for centuries, sailors' movements created a global network of ports where dockers, prostitutes, cabbies, evangelists, barkeeps, and smugglers thrived on sailors' presence. Port economies were often based on these dockside interactions. And in 20th century South Africa, ports were potential hotbeds of subversion, as foreign sailors flouted laws prohibiting interracial sex, smuggled banned James Brown records to the local dancehalls, and spread the gospel of civil rights. Local sailors worked on ships beyond state surveillance; stevedores pilfered cargo, ran illicit rackets, and organized massive strikes; and sugar girls provided the "comforts of home" to passing seamen.
These activities characterize most port cultures up until the 1960s. Thereafter, global maritime conditions changed, eroding dockside economies, restructuring relationships between port inhabitants, and undermining the radical potential of labor mobilization. And in South Africa, racist social engineers segregated the cities, emptying the docklands. I want to understand how these transformations impacted social, cultural, and political possibilities in Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth from WWII to the present.
Preliminary research consisted of sailing for two months on cargo/container ships from Los Angeles to Le Havre (France) and from London to Cape Town in the summer of 2003, docking in 14 ports along the way (via east Asia, the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, northern Europe, then the west coast of Africa). I have received funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC-IDRF), Fulbright-Hays, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and Yale Program in Agrarian Studies. For 2007-8, I will be a Fox International Fellow in Cape Town.
The title of my dissertation will be "Port Culture: A Modern History of South African Sailors, Stevedores & Sugar Girls." My advisors are the historians Bob Harms & Michael R. Mahoney and the anthropologist/political scientist James Scott. For further information, visit my website: www.henrytrotter.com.
