Paulo de Medeiros holds the Chair of Portuguese Studies at Utrecht University. As visiting Professor he has taught at several universities in Portugal, Brazil, Spain, and the UK. He heads the Department of Portuguese Studies and coordinates the interdisciplinary MA on Western Literature and Culture and the Research MA on Comparative Literary Studies. His research centers on Luso-Brazilian narrative, literary and cultural theory with a focus on the interrelations between politics and literature, as well as on postcolonial issues. Current research projects involve questions of contemporary poetics, the intellectual relations between Portugal and Northern Europe, and the representation of conflict. He has recently edited Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht, 2007) and co-edited a number of journal issues in Portugal as well as in the UK and the USA, the most recent of which is a thematic issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies on “Iberian Autobiography” (2008).

Paulo de Medeiros was at CES in July 2010, through the research fellowship ‘Um Mês no CES’, as visiting senior researcher. He presented the Conference Broke Heritages, due to be published as a number of Oficina do CES [CES’ Working Papers].

Broke Heritages, abstract:

Through a series of brief observations of contemporary images and texts, from fashion commercials to romances by Lobo Antunes or Toni Morrisson, the goal is to approach the issue of broke or ruined heritages, an essential confrontation in order to rethink a post-imperial Europe. Based on gender, race and class questioning in relation to the ghostly legacies of a Europe facing a severe identity crisis, and to the imperative of cultural criticism, as base for political reflection, the present work combines elements from post-colonial theories and notions of cultural memory.

Rochelle Pinto is Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She is author of the book Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2007. Her area of research is Portuguese colonialism and the history of Goa.

Rochelle Pinto spent the month of September 2008 at CES on a month long research fellowship, ‘Um Mês no CES’ in the course of which she consulted the library holdings at CES as well as other libraries in the University of Coimbra. The focus of her research was treatises on natural law and property in the context of Portuguese colonialism, and pre-utilitarian conceptions of land, possession, and usage that may have defined legislation on questions of revenue and ownership in sixteenth-century Goa.

The following is an abstract of her paper presented at CES on October 2, 2008.

Space, economy and colonialism: a framework for the study of land

This is an attempt to arrive at a framework for the study of practices around land in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Goa in the early sixteenth century. It begins with a discussion of the implications of the Foral of 1526, an official document produced and circulated by the Portuguese through their consulations with local elites. However, against the idea that a colonial and modern notion of the economy was introduced by colonisers, disrupting the fundamentally linked practices of spiritual and agricultural practice, this paper suggests that this view may be complicated by examining other approaches to the notions of economy and agriculture prevalent among the Portuguese of the sixteenth century. It may be interesting historically and for contemporary politics around land in Goa to examine what may have been pre-utilitarian conceptions of agriculture, value, rurality and cultivation as they were viewed in Portugal and in Goa during the initial decades of colonial rule.