‘Goa has become internally exotic in India because of its Portuguese heritage’

Goans have moved across continents for centuries, travelling as Portuguese nationals through British colonies, building communities in East Africa, navigating citizenship regimes that could not decide whether they were Indian, European, or something else entirely. R Benedito Ferrão’s Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds examines what happens when that experience enters fiction. Published in Michigan University Press’s African Perspectives series, the book reads Goan characters across four novels connected to different continents: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, MG Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, Roger King’s A Girl from Zanzibar, and Margaret Mascarenhas’s Skin, bringing paintings, etchings, and pop music into dialogue with the literary texts to surface what prose alone leaves buried.

Ferrão is an Associate Professor of English and Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary, Virginia, US. Additionally, he is the Dr Thomas Tam Visiting Professor of Asian American Studies at the City University of New York’s Asian American/Asian Research Institute. His previous publications include the edited volume Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, which accompanied an exhibition he curated at Fundação Oriente in Goa, and the co-published The Girl Who was the Color of Nothing: A Children’s Story for Adults with the artist, Maria Vanessa de Sa, who also created the cover image for Across Continents.

In this conversation with...

Read more