Beyond the Margins: Architecture and Belonging in the Western Indian Ocean World

Home in Old Diu, India

This presentation shares Pedro Pombo's experience of exploring the maritime worlds of the Western Indian Ocean through an attention to the aesthetic and material qualities of natural landscapes, urban centers, shoreline life and architecture. While the natural ecologies of this region lead us to navigate between continents with a sense of easiness and familiarity, cities, buildings and architectural details allow us to enter private lives that speak of diaspora, longing and community. Dialoguing between ethnography, art history, architecture and material cultures, this presentation engages with the diversity of archives we find while circulating through several islands and port cities of the Afro-Asian maritime world, and how they frame personal memories and diasporic life experiences.
Date: April 01, 2021, Thursday, 12pm-1pm EST
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About the Speaker

Dr. Pedro Pombo is a Portuguese anthropologist and art historian based in Goa, India. In 2015 he received his PhD in Anthropology from ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, with an ethnography on cartography, landscape, senses of belonging and local history in the South of Mozambique. Pedro researches traces of Afro-Asian circulations crossing aesthetic and anthropological approaches, focusing on archival and material traces, heritages, visual landscapes and memories in the Western Indian Ocean. He is the co-author of a documentary on Goans in Tanzania, with the filmmaker Nalini Elvino de Sousa. His most recent research focuses on African heritages and contemporary art and the relation between culture and environment. He is an associated researcher with the Southern Atlantic/Indian Oceanic Africa cluster of the Project Regions 2050, WiSER, Wits University, South Africa. He was awarded a short-term fellowship with the African Multiple Cluster of Excellence, Bayreuth University (June 2021).

Pre-circulated reading (PDF)

Click the image on the left for the pre-circulated reading.
Citation: Pedro Pombo (2018): Beyond the Margins: Place, Narratives, and Maritime Circuits in Diu, South Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2018.1440059

The Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present webinar is generously supported by funding from Mason's College of Humanities and Social Science through the Interdisciplinary Programming Support Fund and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
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