Six Sessions
Tuesdays, September 22 & 29; October 6 & 20; and November 10 & 24, 2026 | 12pm to 1:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
RSVP (per session): https://2026seminar-ferrao.eventbrite.com
Using a variety of literary and other texts, some referenced in R Benedito Ferrão’s Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds (2026), this six-session seminar will examine representations of displacement, post/coloniality, and transnationalism. These works are predicated upon Afro-Asian, Indian and Atlantic Ocean, Asian diasporic, and lusospheric cultures and identity-making. Concerned with what constitutes a border and how identity and representation, both, fix and contest such limits, the texts that seminar participants will read ask us to consider how we think of the nation and its relationship to the marginalized across multiple global sites. We will gauge how caste, gender, class, race, and sexuality intersect in the creation of identity and culture in colonial, postcolonial, and im/migrant contexts in literary depictions that recharacterize geopolitical belonging.
Readings with no links will be sent to registered attendees before each session.
Session 1 (September 22) – Wor(l)ds
- “The Beginning” in Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa by Jessica Faleiro (Rupa 2012): pp. 107-122
- “Garcia de Orta: The Sephardic Jew who Made India his Home” by Staff in Madras Courier (14 February 2024)
- “Goa on the Literary Atlas: Questioning Belonging” by R. Benedito Ferrão in Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, eds. Nalini Iyer and Pallavi Rastogi (Modern Language Association of America 2024), pp. 79-89
Session 2 (September 29) – The Ocean(s) Between
- Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey in Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One by Mojisola Adebayo (Oberon Books 2011), pp. 19-64
- Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey by Mojisola Adebayo (The Antarctic Collective 2006)
- “Mediterranean Red Coral: A European Merchandise from the First Wave of Globalization” by Olivier Raveux in Manifest (6 March 2023)
Session 3 (October 6) – Some Other Country
- “The Africa Boat” by Laxmanrao Sardessai, trans. Paul Melo e Castro (1964), np
- “How Ascolino de Perpétuo Socorro Lost his Wife” by Mia Couto, trans. David Brookshaw in Third World Quarterly 12.1 (1990), pp. 167-174
- “Of Prison Walls and Barroom Brawls: Postcolonial Categories in Mia Couto’s ‘De Como Se Vazou A Vida de Ascolino de Perpétuo Socorro’ and Laxmanrao Sardessai’s ‘O Barco da África/The Africa Boat’” by Paul Melo e Castro in The Lusotropical Tempest: Postcolonial Debates in Portuguese, eds. Sheila Khan et al (Department of Hispanic, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Bristol 2012): pp. 127-150
Session 4 (October 20) – Continental Drift
- “The Skit” by Roanna Gonsalves, narr. Vinaya Elijala in StorySALOON (9 September 2025)
- “Our American Guest” by Selma Carvalho in The Bombay Review #18 (January-February 2017)
- “Why US and Japan chose Goa for a Prisoner Swap during World War II” by Ajay Kamalakaran in Scroll.in (11 November 2023)
Sessions 5 & 6 (November 10 & 24) – Un/Familiar Cartographies
- Skin by Margaret Mascarenhas (Goa 1556 and Broadway Publishing House 2010)
- “Indian Merchants from Gujarat played Key Role in African Slave Trade” by P. K. Balachandran in Eurasia Review (2 June 2021)
