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Goa: 1961 and Beyond International Conference An Intellectual Appreciation & Celebration of Fifty Years the Liberation of Goa at Goa University, GOA, December 18 to 20, 2011. Co-organised by Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India; Goa University, Goa, India; Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal (http://www.iias.org/goa-1961-beyond.html) Call for Abstracts Abstract Submission: latest by September 15th, 2011: On any of the four themes listed in the Concept note below. Send your abstract to: [email protected]. (Include: Title, 500 word abstract, names of all authors, e-mail address and affiliation. Accepted languages: English. Konkani, Marathi, Portuguese, must be accompanied with English translation). Abstract Presenters will be notified of acceptance or rejection by email by September 30th 2011. Abstracts will be reviewed by the academic committee. Abstract titles and authors will be posted on the IIAS website before the conference begins. Last date for receipt of Paper: December 10, 2011: Only paper readers whose abstracts are accepted and have submitted papers by the last date will be permitted to read their papers. Registration: There is no registration fee. For other details contact [email protected] Young Scholars: To encourage the participation of young scholars and researchers to present their current and innovative work, the academic committee will integrate a special session into the Conference programme. Publication: The conference Volume to be published is intended as an intellectual contribution that will focus on the consequence of the Liberation of Goa in 1961 to the world and in particular to colonies in Africa, Asia and Portugal Peter R deSouza Director Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India Parag Porobo Goa University Goa, India Boaventura de Souza Santos Director Centro de Estudos Sociais Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY, RASHTRAPATI NIVAS, SHIMLA-171 005. Goa: 1961 and Beyond Anniversaries are occasions for reflection and review. They allow us to stand back from the heat and dust of the everyday and instead look for the social patterns in the biography of a region as it wends its way towards the present. The 50th anniversary of the end of colonialism in Goa is thus an opportunity for us to revisit many of the interesting issues that inform current discourses on post-coloniality, state formation, democratization, and nationalism and that frequently intrude into our deliberations on Goa and leave us with a feeling that we have derived less than we could have or should have. The issues that Goa invites us to engage with are not only Goa-centric. They go beyond Goa. One should see them as aspects of a frame within which to locate the empirical discussion of post-colonial spaces, a frame that allows us to recognize the particular inflections of a place while simultaneously recognizing that it has much in common with other similar places. We want this conference to engage with some of these issues so that we can think about Goa, Portugal, India, the luso-phone world, decolonisation, post-coloniality, syncretism, hybridisation, democratisation, etc, in interesting new ways. Post-colonial Goa has a story to tell, a story that must find an appropriate place in the imaginary of Independent India as well as that of post-colonial Portugal. The key conceptual peg around which we want to invite reflections is with respect to the "afterlife of a territory where colonialism first set foot in 1510". The idea of the "afterlife" assumes death which included efforts to wipe out memories, eradicate symbolic markers and revive painful memories. This suggests that something of the previous persists and hence we need to explore what that 'something' is, how long it persists, and why does it do so? The idea of an 'afterlife' allows us to examine the societal transformations brought about during the colonial period. This can help us recognize the residues of these transformations: both the fractures and the continuities that persist in either a robust or a feeble form. These have a role to play in the dynamics of the present. With time they either grow stronger, or remain the same, or just fade away into irrelevance. This question of a residue's longevity is significant if we wish to explore the afterlife of a territory since we will need to explain what persists, what fades, and why. Just discussing events, or themes, or even processes, as many of the seminars that have been organized to mark the anniversary have done, without acknowledging the issue of the "afterlife of both the metropolis and the colonies" may not provide valuable data and insights into the event, theme or process but gives what one can at best describe as a hermeneutic minima. The conference that we are planning on 'Goa: 1961 and Beyond' seeks more than this minima since it wants to open up discursive spaces that have hitherto been considered taboo by some currents on scholarship on Goa. It would be organized around the following themes. The first theme will be on 'Decolonization and the imagination of Goa' From the speeches of Salazar, the documents brought out by the Government of Goa, the essay on 'Denationalization of Goans' by TB Cunha, the submissions before the UN Decolonization committee, the pressure by the newly independent countries of Africa on Nehru as the leader of the Non-Aligned movement, the struggle for liberation in Goa, the 'Voice of Goa' Broadcasts, the resistance poems, novels, speeches, etc. we get rich material, ranging from international history to cultural politics, from which we can debate the struggle for an 'idea of Goa' which was crucial for India, the Lusophone world and Portugal. This struggle, in as much as it was about the status of Goa, was a legal, political, material and also an ideational struggle. It would be of interest if the different aspects of the struggle were explored in detail so that we can appreciate the multiple elements of the legacy of contemporary Goa. The second will be on 'The Beginning of the End'. This could be a more comparative history/politics theme where the date 1961 is seen to mark the unravelling of the Portuguese Empire. Presentations would be welcome on Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Portugal as well as on the larger decolonization process that had built up a certain momentum in Africa. We would need to probe the thesis that 1961 marked the beginning of the end i.e., why the beginning, what are its aspects, and in what way does one describe the end. Did it set the grounds for the end of the Salazar regime as well as the end of Portuguese colonialism? How did Portugal manage the transition if at all? Was there a possibility of 'the beginning of the beginning' as the British did when they created the Commonwealth? This would be an important rubric since it would allow us to see the year 1961 in a comparative frame with respect to the Lusophone world, Goa being part of the Luso-colonial world but less a part of the Lusophone world. The third theme is on the 'The Loss and Afterlife of the metropolis in the colony'. As suggested in an earlier paragraph here issues of the residues and their transformation of the colonial encounter: residues seen for example in law, civil code, municipal administration, religion, expressions, language, food, literature, civilities, private mining leases, architecture, etc. illustrate the criss-crossing of the economic social and cultural domains. The keyword here is "afterlife", and what we would want to identify as deserving recognition as an afterlife and why would we want to identify it to be so. This is important because we can here engage with hybridity, syncreticism, post-coloniality etc. It will also allow us to venture into the cultural and not just the historical, political and social. We could look at the Goan diaspora across the world especially in Portugal. The issue of longevity could perhaps also be examined. The fourth theme will be on the "Dynamics of post-colonial Goa". If the previous section is on the afterlife, suggesting thereby a proximity to the colonial period, this section could be on themes which are the product of Goa's integration with India. What are the terms - cultural, political, and economic - of this integration? Here the processes of democratic politics, the issue of identity, the spread of primary and secondary education, the conflict over the language of instruction, party and electoral politics, Bahujan Samaj, Konkan Railway, Tourism, Globalisation, the rise of new elites, the changing market in land, in other words, the whole field of contemporary Goa, even its diaspora in West Asia, Mumbai etc. can be listed. A comparison in specific domains of Goa with other former colonies in Africa and Asia is also welcome. The Conference is organized by Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Goa University; and Centro de Estudos Socias (CES, Coimbra) at Goa University from 18-20 December 2011. CONTACT The Convenor - Goa: 1961 and Beyond Email: [email protected]
