the playground of empires
& the beyonds of colonial history
Asian topics have been integral to my research from the outset, as they have coincided with my interest in Portuguese maritime expansion, the establishment of the Estado da Índia, and post-Lusitanian cultural legacies. A different perspective arose from my exploration of issues related to Russian landlocked colonization. The third aspect of my triangulation in Asian studies is the triumphant emergence of the continent within the realm of Comparative Literature and global intellectual history.
Asian literatures hold a significant and diverse place in the realm of world literature, reflecting a rich tapestry of distinct literary and intellectual traditions, from the ancient epics of India and China to contemporary works from Japan and Southeast Asia. I am interested in Buddhism and Islam, and eager to explore their influence in the non-Eurocentric intellectual context. Among the topics to explore, I am keen to look closer at all kinds of Asian contaminations, such as Sufism and its eminence as one of the greatest global sources of poetic imagination, and Buddhist legacies intervening in the contemporary ecocentric perspectives. Zen Buddhism influenced not only traditional Japanese arts but also modern philosophical and artistic movements, emphasizing direct experience and intuition. Both Buddhism and Islam contribute significantly to the non-Eurocentric intellectual landscape by providing alternative frameworks for understanding existence, ethics, and culture. They offer rich philosophical traditions that challenge Western hegemony and promote a more pluralistic understanding of knowledge and human experience. This is what makes Asian literary texts so crucial for global perception and make the continent stand so bold in my outlook of intellectual and aesthetic perspectives.
Asian literatures hold a significant and diverse place in the realm of world literature, reflecting a rich tapestry of distinct literary and intellectual traditions, from the ancient epics of India and China to contemporary works from Japan and Southeast Asia. I am interested in Buddhism and Islam, and eager to explore their influence in the non-Eurocentric intellectual context. Among the topics to explore, I am keen to look closer at all kinds of Asian contaminations, such as Sufism and its eminence as one of the greatest global sources of poetic imagination, and Buddhist legacies intervening in the contemporary ecocentric perspectives. Zen Buddhism influenced not only traditional Japanese arts but also modern philosophical and artistic movements, emphasizing direct experience and intuition. Both Buddhism and Islam contribute significantly to the non-Eurocentric intellectual landscape by providing alternative frameworks for understanding existence, ethics, and culture. They offer rich philosophical traditions that challenge Western hegemony and promote a more pluralistic understanding of knowledge and human experience. This is what makes Asian literary texts so crucial for global perception and make the continent stand so bold in my outlook of intellectual and aesthetic perspectives.
my essays in Asian studies
Desires born as imperatives. The temptation of gratuitous luxuriance in colonial travel memoirs on Timor
[in progress]
The article is an analysis of two Portuguese travel memoirs, Paulo Braga’s A ilha dos homens nus (1936) and Alberto Osório de Castro’s A ilha verde e vermelha de Timor (1943). Those colonial texts on Timor are treated as a testimony of imagery, utopias, and fantasies associated with the reality of southern luxuriant islands, in which local communities, able to survive without practising intensive agriculture, would adopt an unrestrained, workless lifestyle. The colonial affective landscape includes various kinds of temptation, associated not only with desirable human bodies but also with vegetable lushness and other essential delights such as breathing the fragrant air. The gratuitousness of those tempting elements contrasts with the colonial invention of labour, production, and commercialization of costly luxuries, such as pearls collected on the island. The novel visibility of gratuitous tropicality is particularly striking when Braga’s and Osório de Castro’s texts are contextualized with the materialism of an earlier travelogue, written by Maria Isabel d’Oliveira Pinto da França Tamagnini. The colonial travellers internalize the perspective of labour exploitation to such a degree that they prove unable to perceive its negative impact. Trust in natural abundance, nurtured by the islanders, is inconceivable and morally unacceptable for them.
The article is an analysis of two Portuguese travel memoirs, Paulo Braga’s A ilha dos homens nus (1936) and Alberto Osório de Castro’s A ilha verde e vermelha de Timor (1943). Those colonial texts on Timor are treated as a testimony of imagery, utopias, and fantasies associated with the reality of southern luxuriant islands, in which local communities, able to survive without practising intensive agriculture, would adopt an unrestrained, workless lifestyle. The colonial affective landscape includes various kinds of temptation, associated not only with desirable human bodies but also with vegetable lushness and other essential delights such as breathing the fragrant air. The gratuitousness of those tempting elements contrasts with the colonial invention of labour, production, and commercialization of costly luxuries, such as pearls collected on the island. The novel visibility of gratuitous tropicality is particularly striking when Braga’s and Osório de Castro’s texts are contextualized with the materialism of an earlier travelogue, written by Maria Isabel d’Oliveira Pinto da França Tamagnini. The colonial travellers internalize the perspective of labour exploitation to such a degree that they prove unable to perceive its negative impact. Trust in natural abundance, nurtured by the islanders, is inconceivable and morally unacceptable for them.
The travellers internalize the perspective of colonial exploitation, be it through developing agro-industrial production of such crops as coffee or the acquisition of luxury materials such as pearls, to such a degree that they prove unable to conceive the negative impact of this exploitation on the islanders and the island. Such a dilettante botanist as Osório de Castro must have been aware of the absence of seasonal scarcity in the tropics as a fact of natural history. Yet foresight and prudence are central virtues, at the same time capitalist, imperial, and, in his Catholic world-view, universally post-lapsarian. Even confronted with the daily spectacle of life in which there is only the shortest of all delays between the desiring lips and the fruits, they reject the eventuality of a life solidly founded on temptation. Trust in natural abundance is both unimaginable and morally unacceptable. No matter how hard they try, the colonial authors are unable to conceive an existence without a forethought, a providential disposition, a stockpile of resources, an existence in which the only imperative is to desire.
Ghosts, eco-queer, Sri Lankan history:
Shehan Karunatilaka’sThe Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
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eTropic, vol. 23, no 1, 2024, p. 156-178.
ISSN 1448-2940 https://journals.jcu.edu.au/index.php/etropic/article/view/4067/3838 Queering the thinking about Sri Lanka, the writer fosters the expansion of attention and awareness beyond the perimeter of human history and memory, no matter how pressing and painful. The photographer’s Nikon camera was an optical instrument forcing him to focus on fragments of reality, framing dead bodies and shameful encounters. Yet the proliferation of shots finally permitted him to transcend this focus. Photography, like history, expands into a widening gyre, the circle of queer intimacy encompasses all beings. Investing in the imagery of broadening, unbounded perspectives, Karunatilaka overcomes not only the marginality of his gay protagonist but also the normative understanding of the politics of interethnic conflict, expanding our understanding to notions of co-presence and co-existence, and our inherent interrelations with the more-than-human world. |
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Travelling away from the 'artsy post-modern lefty-pinko university'. Noor's transcultural experience and the duties of the intellectualColloquia Humanistica, no 3/2014, p. 91-102.
ISSN 2081-6774 https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/ch/article/view/ch.2014.006/570 The volume Qur’an and cricket consists of several travelogues written by Malay intellectual Farish A. Noor during his trips to the most problematic places of the world, shaped by the contemporary “battles of God”. This book is interpreted in terms of a quest for a transcultural condition understood as a dimension of experience transcending the multiplicity of cultural orders in dissent. Noor sketches his own definition of the intellectual, contrasted in this article with the visions given by Gramsci, Adorno and Said. The subject of the transcultural condition is defined as “itinerant scholar” transgressing the limitations of the academia by his nomadic immersion in the world. The attitude of the traveller is marked by openness and readiness to listen, even when he is confronted to irrational mumbling rather than coherent arguments. Precisely the mumbling of anger and hate becomes the most difficult challenge to the intellectual, as he is unable to deal with it rationally. The only remaining answer lies in sheer presence and love, the emotional connection to the world, as the scholar rejects the temptation of the ivory tower that would isolate him from the otherness. The modality of speech that opposes hateful mumbling relies not on clear, persuasive argumentation but on ironic ambivalence conjugated with directness and the rejection of euphemism. Crucially, the “itinerant scholar” is not a preacher. 
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