We are delighted to announce that Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir (King’s College London) would lead our 23rd webinar with a talk on Cochin and its creole and archipelagic memory (see the abstract below) this Thursday (27 Apr) at 7 pm IST.

Dr. Rajesh James (Sacred Heart College, Cochin) would comment on the lecture, and Dr. V.J. Varghese (University of Hyderabad) would chair and moderate the session.

Abstract

In this presentation, I will examine how fiction offers a route to recall, valorise, and reactivate the creolisation processes set into motion by the advent of the Portuguese on the Malabar Coast at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. In particular, I will examine novels that depict the Latin Catholic community that formed thereby, including N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery, Johny Miranda’s Requiem for the Living, Ponjikkara Rafi’s Ora pro nobis, and George Thundiparambil’s Maya. In these novels, the geography, history, and community dynamics of the area known as Fort Kochi are invoked through a narrative technique that I call archipelagic. Using literary close reading alongside theories of creolisation and archipelagicity, I will reveal the political significance of thus narrativizing the Latin Catholics even while arguing for the theoretical inadequacy of the vocabulary of ‘syncretism’ frequently deployed to characterise Kochi’s culture.