Ler História 58 / Maio de 2010
Dossier: Goa: 1510-2010
Ângela Barreto Xavier
PresentationJason Keith Fernandes
«Invoking the Ghost of Mexia: State and Community in Post-colonial Goa»
Filipa Vicente
Peripheral Orientalisms? The Goan historian José Gerson da Cunha (Bombay, 1878)
Cristiana Bastos
Hospitals and colonial society. Splendour, destruction, memory and change in GoaPamila Gupta
«Discourses of Incorruptibility: of blood, smell and skin in Portuguese India»
Nandini Chaturvedula
«Preserving Purity: Cultural Exchange and Contamination in the Late Seventeenth Century»
Catalonia and Portugal in the Peninsular War
Fernando Dores Costa
Massena's invasion in 1810 and the lines of Torres Vedras: a paradoxical confluence of objectives?
Antonio Moliner Prada
The celebrations in the city of Barcelona during the Napoelonic occupation Antonio Moliner Prada
Studies
Miguel Metelo de Seixas
The municipal insignia and the first Portuguese armorial: reasons for an absenceCláudia dos Santos e Márcia Motta
A picture of brazilian empire. Abolition and property in the trajectory of Henrique
Debate
Fernando Ampudia de Haro
An approach to the revision in Spain: the phenomenon Pío Moa
Reviews
Scientific News
Abstracts
Ler História 58 / 2009
Jason Keith Fernandes
Afonso Mexia, was one of the founding figures of the Estado da India. This essay uses a contemporary reference to Mexia, by the Association of the Components of Comunidades, to draw links between the colonial past and postcolonial present, displaying how the legal and social orders of the respective eras twine with each other. In doing so, the paper contemplates the various contestations within communities, and between community and State, as citizenship is sought to be (re)defined in the former Portuguese territory of Goa.
Filipa Lowndes Vicente
By analysing a text written in 1878 on Portuguese orientalism in India throughout the 16th and 17th centuries and its author, José Gerson da Cunha, this article questions notions of centre and periphery, cosmopolitism, and marginality in relation to the places of knowledge production and their agents. Through the confrontation of Gerson da Cunha's historiographical references and its reflexivity, and a text written on the same subject by the Portuguese scholar Sousa Viterbo, the article explores: how did the places from where they were writing influenced their historical perspective and how these places determined the place occupied by Gerson da Cunha within the historiographical canons established subsequently.
Paulo Varela Gomes
The Catholics from Goa and other former Portuguese territories in India created churches and houses which are unique in the world history of architecture. These buildings appeared in Goa and are known since the mid 20th century as Indo-Portuguese architecture. The singularity of this architecture is usually attributed to it being the result of a synthesis between Portuguese architecture and art, on the one hand, and Indian influence, on the other. The present article discusses these churches from a different point of view, examining aspects of the religious situation in which they appeared and suggesting they were the more important early manifestation of an autonomous culture of Goan Catholics.
Cristiana Bastos
This article examines some of the institutions and health care in Goa to discuss the dynamics of power in colonial society. If at first the sumptuous Royal Hospital appears as an operator of segregation, soon becomes an arena for power games involving local groups, religious orders, hierarchies of the state. In early nineteenth century the military hospital is mentioned in official sources as a place of chaos and self-government, but can also be seen as an area in which it develops the influence of some local groups medical institutions, that, in considering the author, will help create a medical school and hospital when they move to the capital Panaji / Goa.
Pamila Gupta
In 1553, the corpse of Jesuit missionary Francisco Xavier was declared miraculously preserved and shipped to Goa. How did the idea of his material incorruptness (through signifiers of blood, smell, and skin) get sustained over the long durée of the Estado da Índia? This paper examines a series of medical examinations(1554, 1614, 1782, 1859, 1952) that were issued to sanction this saint's public displays or Exposições as colonial officials eventually called them. That these autopsy reports discursively lie between Catholic hagiography and Western medicine makes them compelling for understanding the changing anatomy of church and state relations in Portuguese India.
Nandini Chaturvedula
This essay examines several measures taken to regulate Hindu marriages and bailadeiras in order to control cultural exchanges between Catholics and non-Christians in the late seventeenth century. Despite such regulations, Catholics continually interacted with Hindus making the exchange and the adoption of certain practices inevitable. This was true in the case of baptism celebrations, which as the last part of this essay will demonstrate, assimilated certain so-called "Hindu" elements. Ultimately, however, policies dealing with such interactions were highly inconsistent, in part because of the tenuous colonial position of the Portuguese in India in this period.
Fernando Dores Costa
The campaign of 1810-1811 is revisited and the paradoxical confluence of the objectives of both parties considered as an explanation of its characteristics. The army leaded by Masséna invaded Portugal following instructions that were opposed to the Napoleonic combat, including the siege of fortified towns and a slow evolution inside the enemy's territory. Wellington surprised the French with the lines of Torres Vedras, a system of campaign fortifications, having the main function of protecting a British reembarkment of his troops. Wellington's tactics included the destruction of all recourses that could maintain the French, creating a open conflict between the British commander and some members of the council of governors of Portugal.
Antonio Moliner Prada
This paper indicates that a continuity in the parties celebrated in the city of Barcelona, under the Napoleonic occupation of 1808-1814, and they Kept the meaning that had in the early modern time. The new introduced celebration the 15 of August in honor of the Emperor, St. Napoleon, had little echo between citizens, as opposed to the tradicional celebration of the Virgin of August that celebrates this day.
Miguel Metelo de Seixas
In Portugal, in the fourteenth century, the armorials became one of the instruments by which the Crown, via the heralds, tried to establish its exclusive authority on heraldic matters. Heraldry conveyed the image of a particular social and political order. The arms of noble families, collected in armorials by royal officers, demonstrated the position that the Crown recognized them. The municipal arms, borne by municipalities with no interference of the Crown, bypassed this process. They challenged both the common association between heraldry and nobility, and the authority of the heralds. It was, therefore, pointless that such emblems appear in those armorials.
Cláudia dos Santos e Márcia Motta
This article connects the trajectory of the State Counsellor - Henriqiue de Beaurepaire-Rohan as a tradicional elite member of Brazilian Empire with the rural democracy project worked out by Rio de Janeiro´abolitionists circles from 1883. As the article focues on B. Rohan´s trajectory we intend to show how he became an argument of authority able to ground and legitimate the arguments of many abolitionists. In spite of the failure of the projects of land reform, the net of alliances built permitted the project of democracy to go beyond the esphere of the radical abolitionism, so that it gain more repercution in political debates in the last years of Brazilian monarchy.
Fernando Ampudia de Haro
The author proposes a general approach to the revisionism on the Spanish Civil War (and Franco's dictatorship. As a social phenomenon, revisionism develops beyond the academic field itself, involving mass media, publishers, think-tanks and political figures. So, beyond the "truth" or the "falsity" of the revisionist thesis, they are going to be analyzed as a social phenomenon linked to certain social transformations happened in Spain, mainly since the election victory of the Popular Party of José María Aznar (1996) until the victory of the Socialist Party in 2004.