Books by R. Benedito Ferrão
Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, 2017
"So, What Happens when You Lose Everything?" - introduction to Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many ... more "So, What Happens when You Lose Everything?" - introduction to Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (2017), edited by R. Benedito Ferrão.
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Editorials (Special Issues of Journals) by R. Benedito Ferrão
eTropic, 2023
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanitie... more eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. Published by James Cook University, a leading research institution on critical issues facing the Tropics. Free open access, Scopus Scimago Q1.
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eTropic, 2023
This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing ... more This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectively address questions of whose voices are heard or silenced, what positions we write from, how we are allowed to articulate our ideas, and through which mediums we present our research. In doing so, the contributions foreground the critical importance of these and other questions in any move towards decolonizing the tropics.
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João Roque Literary Journal , 2021
Introductory editorial for "1991: Dispossessions - A 30th Anniversary Remembrance of the Gulf War... more Introductory editorial for "1991: Dispossessions - A 30th Anniversary Remembrance of the Gulf War," special issue of the João Roque Literary Journal (Autumn 2021)
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João Roque Literary Journal, 2018
Introductory editorial for "Goa and its Worlds: A Literary Journey," special issue of the João Ro... more Introductory editorial for "Goa and its Worlds: A Literary Journey," special issue of the João Roque Literary Journal (March 2018).
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Papers by R. Benedito Ferrão
Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, 2024
Since 2014, I have been instructing variations of a course titled Portuguese India and its Litera... more Since 2014, I have been instructing variations of a course titled Portuguese India and its Literary Afterlife. My courses examine how Portuguese colonialism connect(ed) South Asia, primarily Goa, with other parts of the world. Covering such themes as imperialism, diaspora, and contemporary phenomena of nationalism and globalization, my classes call attention to how race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity, shape subjectivity in various genres of writing. As this essay establishes, teaching fiction about Portuguese India and its diaspora from a postcolonial viewpoint productively destabilizes how students think about national belonging.
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2024
Our reading of the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) to the United Nations building in New York se... more Our reading of the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) to the United Nations building in New York seeks out the influence of the architect’s minority Goan origins in his design practice. By focusing on the Islamicate and Indo-Portuguese aesthetics he would have been exposed to, we demonstrate how Charles Correa’s regional influences represent a more complex sense of South Asian-inspired built space in the United States.
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Journal of Festive Studies, 2023
Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, pr... more Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy, coupled with the exoticization of Goa, which has rendered it a pleasure periphery to the subcontinent. Such difference, and attraction, occurs because, unlike most of the rest of the India that annexed Goa, the region was a Portuguese colony until 1961. Goa's Lusitanization suggests a more liberal milieu, social gatherings with music and dancing being commonplace culturally, for example. While tourism has become an economic mainstay in Goa, the party economy pays little heed to Goans and their culture, treating the land as a place where fun is paramount and local concerns, including environmental ones, are sidelined.
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eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2023
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Decolonial Aesthetics II: Modes of Relating, 2023
With a focus on two works by artist Karishma D'Souza, the authors meditate on connections between... more With a focus on two works by artist Karishma D'Souza, the authors meditate on connections between Indian and Atlantic Oceanic worlds, especially as they are informed by Lusophonic histories. The linkages thus drawn include ecological considerations, the passage of enslaved peoples, trade dealings, and cultural ties. In honing in on D'Souza's art and practice, this chapter seeks to understand how aesthetics are influenced by placemaking while also taking cognizance of the cultural multiplicities created through oceanic connections.
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Imaginations, 2023
This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectur... more This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan identity.
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RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens Journal of Communication and Languages , 2022
In this photo essay, we offer a variety of representations of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, the stru... more In this photo essay, we offer a variety of representations of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, the structure which famously houses the remains of St. Francis Xavier, highlighting its aesthetic transformations historically. Through this visual journey, we intervene in ongoing debates about the Basilica’s appearance, these having arisen over the necessity to alter the building’s iconic look. Such visual education may then hasten its replastering, a restoration that returns the Basilica to its original form and will extend its life by protecting it from climate-related damage.
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World History Bulletin, 2022
The graphic novel, The Destination is the Journey, is Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar’s last publish... more The graphic novel, The Destination is the Journey, is Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar’s last published artistic work. It appears in the compendium Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, which accompanied a 2017-18 retrospective of the same title at Fundação Oriente in Panjim, Goa. That exhibition was the final time Navelcar’s art would be seen publicly while he was alive. Despite his artistic and historical importance, Navelcar is little known in his native Goa, not least because both the artist and his once-Portuguese-colonized homeland cannot neatly be factored into the post-British nationalization of India and its art history. This essay centers on The Destination is the Journey as a fictionalized biographical text to consider how the graphic novel can act as a record of history that does not reconcile with the making of the postcolonial nation-state.
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Verge, 2022
Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was bein... more Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was being decolonized in the 1960s, and then exiled in postcolonial Mozambique in the 1970s, Vamona Navelcar became the artist of three continents not solely by choice. At the same time as his work chronicles these diverse locations, these very transits have made Navelcar’s legacy verge on disappearance. As this article argues, it is the politics of nationalism at the three continental sites that constitute Navelcar’s life-cartography that have defined this artist’s trajectory and obscured his oeuvre. Even as Navelcar’s life and artistic connections across the Lusophonic Indian Ocean-world demonstrate the multiplicities and convergences of the region, it is the fixity of nation(s) that has undermined the complexity of such heritage and the artist’s legacy.
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Roadsides, 2021
This essay uses a sonic history of 1980s music as literary analysis of Thatcher’s neoliberal agen... more This essay uses a sonic history of 1980s music as literary analysis of Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda for infrastructural changes to public housing and broadcasting.
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Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2021
Dubai, not India, is the location of the world's only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence ... more Dubai, not India, is the location of the world's only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence jump from screen to simulated life at Bollywood Parks Dubai (bpd), allowing for the consumption of film and associated entertainment to occur trans-medially and transnationally. Accordingly, this essay delves into representations of culture and violence, through filmic imaginaries, that link South Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Using Bollywood/film studies alongside area and postcolonial studies and architectural history, I consider how theme parks work as manifestations of the fantastic, suturing cultural entertainment and racialized violence by proxy in a built space. In this, bpd is a site of culturally co-optive consumption and mediation between the orientalist, or re-orientalized, differences of Asian subjects to the exclusion of the occident(als). Focusing on its patrons and its film-based rides, and through research in the digital humanities, such as studies of first-person shooter games, I demonstrate how bpd serves as a mediascape that thrives on the reorientalized fantasy of Indian cinema. bpd thus provides a simulacral space in which patrons may vicariously test the limits (and possibilities) of South Asian-Middle Eastern multiculturalism, as well as Indian caste mores, against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization.
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eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 2021
In November 2020, Indian celebrity Milind Soman posted a picture of himself on social media, whic... more In November 2020, Indian celebrity Milind Soman posted a picture of himself on social media, which showed him running naked on a beach. He was charged with obscenity. This article considers the time and place of Soman's act over the alleged impropriety. The photograph was taken on a beach in Goa, the tropical setting serving as a pleasure periphery to India which annexed the region in 1961. Accordingly, a longer history of states of undress in Indian advertising, filmmaking, and tourism are considered here to apprehend how Goa has been posited in the Indian imagination as a destination for wanton self-gratification while local realities are undermined. The article thus interrogates what it means for Goa, whose economy is overly dependent on tourism, to serve as a vacation spot during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when, in 2020, it had among the highest number of virus-related deaths in the country (Dias, 2020, par. 4). Using the metaphor of the celebrity who has no qualms about running naked and unmasked in Goa, this article enquires into what such events leave unrevealed in the economic requirement that some locales function as holiday destinations, even in the midst of a pandemic.
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Society and Culture in South Asia, 2021
By focusing on the differences between how the designation of a Patient Zero in the emergence of ... more By focusing on the differences between how the designation of a Patient Zero in the emergence of HIV and COVID-19 occurred in Goa, this article considers which individuals and communities attract and are able to stave off disease-related stigma. Goa was where the first instance of HIV-infection was discovered in India in 1989, causing Dominic D’Souza to maneuver his public “outing” into AIDS-activism. In comparison, the first instance of a self-authored testimonial by a COVID-19 patient in Goa indicates a subversion of stigma, but is coded in respectability politics. With particular attention paid to the role media plays in such situations, the role of the state in handling crises caused by infectious diseases is also analyzed, especially as it relates to marginalized communities.
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Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective, 2021
The year 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the passing of activist Dominic D’Souza, who succumb... more The year 2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the passing of activist Dominic D’Souza, who succumbed to AIDS-related complications briefly after being diagnosed as the first person in India to have become infected with HIV. On this anniversary, as in the past, D’Souza’s death was used as a platform for gay rights in India, not least because of the film My Brother… Nikhil (2005), allegedly the first in India to depict a gay story. Yet, D’Souza never claimed to be gay, and the film does not acknowledge the use of the activist’s life-story in its credits. Using the director’s admission that MBN was nevertheless inspired by D’Souza’s life and legacy, this essay examines it as a quasi-biopic that employs the struggles of the AIDS activist to champion the rights of middle class gay men in India while failing to represent the larger political ramifications of AIDS advocacy. Alongside this, the essay also recoups the figure of D’Souza as a Goan person to consider what this could mean for the possibility of queer activism beyond the limitations of nationalism.
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Tomás: The Journal of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies, 2020
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Books by R. Benedito Ferrão
Editorials (Special Issues of Journals) by R. Benedito Ferrão
Papers by R. Benedito Ferrão