Florence as the capital for a new united Italy became a flourishing, and brief, centre for indian studies. This experience was always entangled with Angelo De Gubernatis's biography and initiatives ...and when he left for Rome, the city lost its role. Having decided to leave his rich and prolific archive in Florence's main public library meant, however, that Gubernatis returned to the city and placed it on the map of 19th century "oriental studies". Through congresses, exhibitions, museums, a worldwide network of correspondents, journals, academic teaching and travel writing and the protagonism of Angelo de Gubernatis, "oriental", "India" and "Sanskrit" became recurrent words in the Renaissance city and spaces of physical and intellectual encounter between scholars of different origins. In my paper I will also analyse how the investment in "oriental studies" became part of a strategy of affirmation of the new nation of Italy within Europe and within a wider geography were knowledge circulated through written, visual and material forms.
In 1860, Goa hosted the Industrial Exhibition of Portuguese India with 230 exhibitors and over 4,000 articles on display, all described in a comprehensive printed catalogue. How can we explain that ...Goa, considered the most neglected Portuguese colony by the late 19th century, had an “industrial exhibition” five years before the first international exhibition to take place in Portugal, in 1865, and twenty years before the first exhibition held in a Portuguese colony, that of Cape Verde, in 1881? This article tries to understand the meaning of a local initiative that led to the display of Goa’s entangled past, present, and future – a space which was ‘displayed’ across time and described by many as a “country”, with its own identity, and separate from the “other” India.
Vicente interviews Ariella Aisha Azoulay, author, curator, and theorist of photography. Among other things, Azoulay talks about why she addresses photography, why does photography matters to politics ...and citizenship, and the political ontology of photography.
Other Orientalisms analyses various forms of knowledge about India through the circulation of people, ideas, knowledge, images and objects between Florence and Bombay. In the second half of the ...nineteenth century Florence became an important centre for studies on India, manifested in the organisation of exhibitions, museums, journals and international conferences. Inspired by the relationship between two Indianists – the Italian Angelo De Gubernatis, a teacher of Sanskrit in Florence and the Goan José Gerson da Cunha, a physician and historian in Bombay – this book discloses an India that emerged from different places, peopled by a multiplicity of voices. The institutional, intellectual and museum experience of Florentine orientalism, albeit peripheral, further enhances the debate on knowledge and colonial power that has engaged social and human sciences in recent decades.
SERIES: “IN THEIR OWN WORDS” Vicente, Filipa Lowndes; Fruzzetti, Lina
Análise social,
01/2021, Volume:
56, Issue:
4 (241)
Journal Article
This interview with Lina Fruzzetti, a Brown University Professor at the anthropology department, is part of a series of interviews I did when I spent the academic year of 2016-17, in Providence ...(Rhode Island, usa): the first semester as a visiting scholar in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (Michael Teague flad/Brown Visiting Professorship) and throughout the second semester working on several research and writing projects, all the while attending the countless activities on open offer at Brown. Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s interview was the first to be published in Análise Social, in 2020, shortly after the publication of her book Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism. 3 I am glad to publish, in this issue of Análise Social, the second interview of this series – Lina Fruzzetti’s. Of the six women I interviewed, Fruzzetti was the only one that had been at Brown for decades – since 1975 – and the first black woman to have tenure in the social sciences at the Ivy-League University, not a short venture in a country that is still dealing with serious racial discrimination in all spheres, including the higher education level.
Abstract
By analyzing the history of a photograph taken in a Bombay photo studio in 1885, this article explores notions of the production of knowledge on India and cultural dialogues, encounters, ...appropriations, and conflicts in colonial British India in the late nineteenth century. The photograph was taken after a Hindu religious ceremony in honour of the Italian Sanskritist Angelo de Gubernatis. Dressed as a Hindu Brahman, he is the only European photographed next to three Indian scholars, but what the image suggests of encounter and hybridity was challenged by the many written texts that reveal the conflicting dialogues that took place before and after the portrait was taken. Several factors were examined in order to decide who should and who should not be in the photograph: religion, cast, and even gender were successively discussed, before the category of "knowledge" became the bond that unified the four men who studied, taught, and wrote on India.
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