ABSTRAC: In this presentation, I provide an overview of my recent book, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (Bloomsbury Academic 2019). My study of Portuguese decolonization is framed by five interconnected approaches. First, I approach the study of decolonization as simultaneously a historical event and an ethnographic moment, through different eyewitness accounts that access the experience of the transfer of state power. Second, I focus on the materiality of decolonization, one that involves the massive movement of people, ideas and things across vast oceanic and territorial spaces in a heightened manner and rapid time frame. My third area of research looks at the trauma of decolonization (both singly and doubly experienced for many), as something that has largely not been allowed to be articulated as a form of loss, especially for those minority communities caught between matrices of new and old power that I showcase in this book. Fourthly, this project of decolonization is one of writing post-national narratives that takes its cue from the analytic work and intertwined histories showcased in the book. My fifth (and last) area of intervention is to open up the kinds of source materials we use to access narratives of decolonization as different forms of seeing, thinking and writing about history. It is here that I juxtapose what I consider the visual, the lyrical and the visceral. As a way to illustrate these five distinct approaches to studying decolonization, I will showcase individual case studies drawn from specific body chapters.
Pamila Gupta is Professor at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She has written on such varied topics as the monsoon; monuments, tiles and the colour blue for the Portuguese diaspora in South Africa; islandness in the Indian Ocean; tourism and heritage design in Goa; Goan fishermen and urban renovation in Mozambique; tailoring, photography and visual cultures in Zanzibar; and chick-lit and swimming pools in Johannesburg. She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (UNISA, 2010). Her first monograph entitled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India was published by Manchester University Press (2014) and her second monograph entitled Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography was recently published with Bloomsbury Academic Press (2019).