1 Introduction 2 Revisiting the Creole Port City
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Notes 1 Introduction 1 . See my book manuscript, tentatively titled “Kuala Lumpur, Myanmar City: Cosmopolitanism in an Indian Ocean Postcolony.” 2 . Incidentally, matrilineality as an Indian Ocean or Atlantic research subject seems to be scarce to nonexistent. It is, nonetheless, difficult to believe that matrilineality should never travel, even when people who are matrilineal clearly did, as in the case of the Minangkabau or the vari- ous groups, both Hindu and Muslim, of the Malabar Coast. There is an interesting historical counterpoint here between patrilineal male outsid- ers and matrilineal local female ancestors, as in the case highlighted by Ghosh (1993) for Malabar, but also in the case of Senegambian and other societies. 3 . See Assubuji and Hayes (2013) for an article on the life of Kok Nam, a Chinese Mozambican photographer belonging to the Guangdong diaspora. 4 . I must add here that Goans often cannot trace that connection either, at least not in terms of an ethnic ancestry. That is the case of the Le ã o family men- tioned above. In fact, when I once pressed Dr Má rio Le ã o about the ultimate origins of his family, he mentioned Afonso de Albuquerque’s famous policies of the 1510s (sic), whereby Portuguese men were encouraged or made to marry local women. This story is very much reminiscent of that of the ori- gin of Melakan Portuguese families, also supposedly somehow tracing their ancestry back to Albuquerque’s conquest of the city and marriages between Portuguese outsiders and local women. 2 Revisiting the Creole Port City * I am very grateful to Alain Pascal Kaly, from Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, for having introduced me to Abdoulaye Sadji’s work and also for having extensively discussed with me over the years the history and nature of Senegambian societies as well as intellectual legacies in the region, 180 Notes in addition to the deep ties between Senegambia and the Antilles. Without these discussions, the writing of this piece would not have been possible. An article related to this chapter but tackling only Senegal has appeared before (Fernando Rosa 2012). 1 . Of course, Martin Bernal’s rereading of classical Greece as a civilization at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was not known at the time (Bernal 1987). 2 . For information on Lima and bibliography, see, for instance, Wasserman (1992), Sevcenko (1995), Figueiredo (2004), and Engel (2009). 3 . See Wasserman (1992) for an excellent comparison between both authors. 4 . The next paragraph is based on my chapter (see Ribeiro 2010). 5 . In fact, as Teixeira (1980) indicates, Lima took almost 20 years to write out the story. It was therefore first conceived in the first years of the twentieth century. The short story was published in 1919. Both story and novel have the same plot. 6 . This is an honorary title. 7 . It is remarkable how notions of morality in Rio were not necessarily at odds with what Gouda and Stoler describe for the colonial Netherlands Indies (today’s Indonesia) of the same time (see Gouda 2008: Chap. 5; Caulfield 2000; Stoler 1989). This makes us suspect that these notions not only cut across continents but also the colonial/postcolonial divide. 8 . All translations are my own. For colonial imaginings on the nyai , see Gouda (2008: Chap. 5). 9 . It is part of his famous tetralogy, the Buru Quartet, first conceived when the author was in a labor camp as a prisoner on Buru Island. It was first published in 1980 and then swiftly banned by the Suharto government. In fact, it is only in the past decade that all of Pramoedya’s books have become widely available in Indonesia. See Foulcher (1981). 10 . Dehon (1996: 118) reads Sadji’s work, as a whole, as fundamentally conser- vative and condemnatory of his female characters. 11 . Of course, other readings are possible here: as Foulcher (1981) suggests, Anneliese’s apparent passiveness can be read as part of her strategic self- identification not as a legally European woman but instead as a Javanese one, just like her mother (her choosing Minke as a husband also points in that direction). 12 . Sadji and Senghor published together (Sadji and Senghor 1953). 13 . For a generic Luso-African identity in Senegambia, see Mark (2002), Brooks (2003), Diouf (2000). 14 . This is not to say that neither Rio nor Saint-Louis has a precolonial history. Only, differently to Surabaya’s, that history is not related to transoceanic exchanges before the arrival of Europeans (both French and Portuguese in both Rio and Saint-Louis). For Surabaya, see Faber (1931, 1952) and Dick (2003). 15 . I am grateful to Johny Kushayri, from the history department at Airlangga, for having extended the invitation to spend a couple of days there in January 2011. He and his colleagues also showed me around the Arab quarter as well as Dutch colonial buildings, including the school building Notes 181 where Tirto Adhi Soeryo—Pramoedya’s Minke’s real life model—used to study over a hundred years ago. 16 . I am a former resident of Copacabana Posto 5, an area where prostitution is rife on the beachfront. There is also transsexual and male prostitution in Rio, and therefore prostitution is not by any means an activity carried out only by women. See Pasini (2005) for an anthropological study related to Vila Mimosa, a traditional prostitution quarter in the center of Rio where foreigners are also present in large numbers. Of course, locals are also among its clients. 17 . That hybridity was seen locally as neither strictly nor mainly “racial,” is also borne out by Margana’s analysis of the Indo-Creole elite in late colonial Central Java (Margana 2010). This also seems to indicate a more complex social environment than the mere European versus native divide was. 18 . In fact, it can be argued that Lima and Pram had in common a deep disil- lusionment with their countries of origin, which lies at the root of their critical outlook on their own societies as well as their intellectual and literary work. 3 The Malabar Coast (Kerala) and Cosmopolitanism 1 . Jacobs and Malpas (2011) also offer a good summation of perspectives, issues, and literature related to cosmopolitanism. 2 . See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A19 99.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dparoiki%2Fa (consulted on March 6, 2015). 3 . See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A19 99.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dpa%2Froikos (consulted on March 6, 2015). 4 . I am grateful to Patrick Desplat with University of Cologne for this phrase. 5 . I am grateful to both Aqbal Singh in Singapore and Patrick Desplat with the University of Cologne for reminding me of the abiding importance of M é rleau-Ponty’s work, which I had first encountered thanks to my father, Walter, in Brasília in the 1980s, who is a lifelong admirer and avid reader of the philosopher. 6 . I am grateful to Mark Frost with the University of Essex for having pointed this out to me. 7 . See the entry in Iranica: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/avicenna-ii (consulted on March 7, 2015). 8 . I am grateful to Arunima Gopinath, from Jawarhalal Nehru University, with whom I visited several churches in central Kerala in June 2009, for pointing this out. 9 . I am grateful to Andrea Acri, with the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre in Singapore, for having pointed out to me these ancient networks on which he works. 10 . See, for instance, the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/ ), accessed on March 14, 2015. 182 Notes 4 Revisiting Creoles and Other Languages in the Lusophone Indian Ocean * This chapter is a result of research on the Luso-Creole heritage in the Indian Ocean, originally started at the University of Saint Joseph, Macau, and contin- ued for two years at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. I am particularly grateful to Professor Terence Gomez, head of the Research Cluster in Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Malaya. In Macau, I am grateful to Professor Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, former Vice-Rector of Universidade de Sã o Jos é , for the opportunity to spend time there in 2009–2010. An earlier ver- sion was presented in absentia at the Inter-Asian Connections IV conference in Istanbul, October 2–4, 2014, in the panel ‘The Sounds and Scripts of Language in Motion’. 1 . I have not had access to archives and libraries in Lisbon or Goa. I have therefore only worked with sources that I could find in Kuala Lumpur and, to some extent, Macau. 2 . The Netherlands remains to this day an important hub of Creole studies. 3 . All of Dalgado’s studies on Creoles have been collected in one volume (Dalgado 1998). 4 . This contrasts with the earlier publication of his Diccionario de Komkani- Portuguez (“Konkani-Portuguese Dictionary”) when he had to use his own money to get his bulky volume printed in Bombay (Dalgado 1893). Dalgado dedicated the Gloss á rio to Jos é Leite de Vasconcellos. 5 . Jos é Gerson da Cunha (1844–1900) is a Goan also working on Konkani during Dalgado’s time. Dalgado is critical of his work, which he sees as too restricted (Dalgado 1905: X). Cunha is apparently the only other Goan in the field before the twentieth century. Bastos describes him succinctly as a “prestigious Bombay physician and intellectual” (Bastos 2010: 191). See also the brief sketch in Vaz (1997: 118–119) showing that Gerson was in fact even more of a polymath than Dalgado, though he published a single volume on Konkani, moreover in English only (Cunha 1881), whereas all of Dalgado’s publications on Konkani seem to be in Portuguese and Konkani.